Re: In defense of Customize [was: Trying to right-align my window on startup]

[phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

>> > > But (IMHO) too many people ignore Customize, often because
>> > > they've gotten the impression somehow that it is for non-Lispers
>> > > or wimps.
>> >
>> > I just hate its UI.
>> 
>> If a first year student of mine cannot distinguish data and code
>> (s)he'd get an F grade.  customize does that.
>
> No, it is Emacs that does that, by not requiring (or even
> encouraging) the use of `custom-file', and by telling Customize to
> put code in your init file by default.  That is a not-so-wise design
> decision about how Emacs uses Customize.  It is not the fault of
> Customize if Emacs tells it to write to your init file.

I also found this problematic. Nowadays I don't really have a .emacs per
se; all it does is add ~/emacs to the load-path, and then loads a file
from there.

There used to be another bug with this -- if you launched with -q
customize would refuse to save state even if you had set custom file
elsewhere. That appears to have gone now.

>
> To tell you the truth, I never thought I'd be an apologist for
> Customize.  I too used to avoid it and use only hand-coded Lisp
> for all of my customizations.  And I too am no big fan of the UI
> (and I have proposed and implemented some UI enhancements).  I have
> probably criticized it (in concrete terms, including bug reports)
> as much as anyone.

I use customize for things configuration that I don't want to sync
between machines, and hand-crafted lisp for everything else. But even
here customize is good, because the structure of the defcustom form
tells you as much as the documentation about how to set things.

I would like to have a "custom-setq" which set a var, checked to see
whether the types were correct wrt customize, then crashed if not. It
would be nice to use the knowledge of customize from lisp.

Phil