Re: themes

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com> writes:
>> I set my background by customizing the `default' (and _also_ via
>> .Xresource, since otherwise emacs flashes and goes crazy during
>> startup).  The custom-theme stuff doesn't seem to be able to cope with
>> that.
>
> Ah, yes.  This is due to a design decision in the Custom Themes code: it
> deliberately ensures that the user's own customizations override
> anything set by a theme, which in term overrides changes set outside
> Customize.  (All settings should be reversible.)
>
> The idea is that you should be able to load a theme, and then change
> individual settings to you disagree with.  This seems like a reasonable
> thing to want, though it's true that it could lead to confusion.

That might be a good policy if everybody started out using themes, chose
a theme they liked, and then made a few tweaks on top of it -- but I
think that may not reflect reality very well... a fair number of people
may be like me, and have a large number of tweaked faces already in
place when they hear about themes.  They'll try out themes, notice they
all seem a bit off, and might even abandon the concept...

> Maybe the Customize Themes buffer should display a warning about this.

I guess, though a warning doesn't seem all that useful -- what should a
user _do_ when he sees it?  Go through all his customizations and turn
them off one by one?

Maybe a "convert all my settings to a theme" function would be useful --
it could prompt for a name, and create a  theme with all the user's
default settings; then it remove them as "overriding" settings.  Then a
user could easily switch between his "original" settings, and various
themes.

On top of that, a function/mode/whatever that made it very simple to
copy individual faces from themes to/from other themes or the
"non-theme" settings.

Maybe even in "one-theme-at-a-time" mode, there could be a distinguished
"override" theme that would represent overriding non-theme settings?

I dunno...

-Miles

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