On Fri, Aug 20, 2021, 12:47 Ergus <spacibba@aol.com> wrote:

>No-one ever made it a customized variable.  I dislike too many customize
> >variables,
> That's the emacs way ;)
>

No, it's the custom.el way, which is a part of emacs, and which many users
like. Many others don't.

>but I don't oppose this one.
> >
> But if a variable can be safely changed by the user, then it must be a
> custom,


No. Not necessarily. There is, to the best of my understanding, no such
orthodoxy in Emacs. Maybe some other maintainer can correct me.

otherwise the variable is intended for internal use
> right? So the "good" users assume they shouldn't touch it.
>

No. The emacs user manual prescribes other ways to change variables, on
occasion. There is no such orthodoxy. Putting -- in a variable's prefix is
the way to mark it as intended for internal use.

This is why the initial attempt implementation I did for
> icomplete-vertical used to check if there were newlines in
> icomplete-separator; to respect somehow the user preferences and not add
> new customs.
>

In my experience, that kind of complexity to try to achieve custom.el
purity is always unwarranted.

>Users can set non-customizable variables
> But are harder to discover. The defcustom infrastructure and the

customize-* functions help us,
>

There are many means to discover variables and user visible structures.
That has been discussed at length here recently, so I won't repeat that
discussion.

João

>