Re: site-start.el: inhibit-startup-screen?

[Stefan Vollmar <vollmar@nf.mpg.de>]

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Dear Joel,

On 20.05.2010, at 21:04, Joel J. Adamson wrote:

[...]
> Just curious: Why do so many people loathe the splash screen?  Why is it
> controversial?


I hasten to emphasize that I do not loathe the splash screen - in fact, I can honestly say that I quite like the design and the overall idea. However, I think I can justify why I put some effort today into the inhibit-startup-screen discussion:

We are trying to convince some MS Windows users at our institute to use Emacs (for now, just for a specific purpose). These users have certain expectations (some of them actually do make sense) and one of them is that they can drop a file on the Emacs icon shortcut and that file is then opened with Emacs, another is that when they open Emacs with a double-click it should present an "untitled" buffer ready-for-input. 

Unless a user manually disables the splashscreen, neither of these requirements works. 

If you know that the splashscreen behaves just like another buffer (in some respects), that just opening another file will make it disappear and that there really (really) is no need to always quit Emacs immediately after using it - you are not in a good position to appreciate the irritation about the splashscreen that some Windows users have reported. Naturally, we tell them about just keeping Emacs open and use multiple buffers - but old habits die hard.

Here is another reason: we have had requests from Windows users that could they please have some keyboard shortcuts that they are accustomed to such as this one:

(global-set-key [(S-kp-insert)] 'cua-paste)

This and a couple of other things were very easy to implement, it was fun to do and these guys were really impressed by how flexible Emacs is (and, yes, that was a very nice kind of feedback).

All adaptions were done by simply adding to a site-start.el file in site-lisp, starting with a plain vanilla emacs-23.2 build from the GNU site (great work, thanks!).

inhibit-startup-screen was the only thing we could not accomplish in this manner and so, in a way, this violates the truly great flexibility of Emacs. Maybe this is a source of irritation for me: it is an unnecessary restriction of my freedom to customize Emacs.

I can see why it is important, useful and wise to show the splashscreen by default. However, I vote that there should a way to switch it off in site-start.el in order to create specific distributions (adding personal .emacs files for Windows users is not practical). 

Warm regards,
 Stefan
-- 
Dr. Stefan Vollmar, Dipl.-Phys.
Head of IT group
Max-Planck-Institut für neurologische Forschung
Gleuelerstr. 50, 50931 Köln, Germany
Tel.: +49-221-4726-213  FAX +49-221-4726-298
Tel.: +49-221-478-5713  Mobile: 0160-93874279
Email: vollmar@nf.mpg.de   http://www.nf.mpg.de







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