Re: use-package

[Kaushal Modi <kaushal.modi@gmail.com>]

On Wed, May 11, 2016, 6:59 AM Phillip Lord

> The question is, though, which is the most sensible default.
>
> Which kind of illustrates my point, I think. Most of your work is
> switching things off!
>
> I think we can do a better job of the defaults, by simply moving to "no
> lighter by default".
>

I would still say that the default would be to keep the lighters on. It is
useful especially when people have installed some minor mode and have
enabled that globally or locally without understanding the full
implications. Then by simply glancing at the minor mode lighter list, they
can get a hint as to what's different in the environment between when
things are behaving as they expect vs the things they do not.

Also you saw just the list of minor mode lighters that I like to hide. It's
very possible that someone else likes to hide the lighters I choose to show
and show some of those that I am hiding. Overall when you overlay the
choice of all emacs users (do an OR condition of everyone's choices), I
would not be surprised if that result leaned  towards showing almost all
the lighters.

We cannot set the defaults based on the preferences of just you and me. I
think that it is more important to have those to help people debug stuff
and avoid frustration.

The list of minor mode lighters that I hide has grown over time. For few I
was often confused on which ones I want to be shown vs which I do not. Also
as my experience with elisp grew, I relied less on the lighters and more on
C-h v minor-mode-name. But that does not justify turning the lighters off
for everyone by default, even for people who may be just started using
emacs. If the lighters are on, then they would at least know what question
to ask.. Like "Hey, things are funny only when I have XYZ in the thing at
the bottom".

Here's the initial thinking:
1. Leave the defaults as they are now.
2. Add a customizable option to hide all lighters.
3. Allow user to customize a white list or black list of minor modes. So
you might choose to show all lighters except a few in black list. Or you
might choose to hide all except a few in white list.

Thinking of that, may be rich-minority should be integrated into the core.
But then, why do that when it is already included in GNU Elpa. We are
anyways trying to keep only the very essential code in the core and put the
useful, nice to have feature packages in Elpa. It's pretty straight forward
to install that package today and configure as you need.

So the final proposal would be to not hide the lighter by default and use
the available packages like rich-minority to set user-specific lighters.

> --

-- 
Kaushal Modi