On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 1:40 PM Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
wrote:

> João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> writes:
>
> >                          I just meant the "custom-themes"
> > infrastructure should be enough to accommodate enough of
> > the proposed "modern-mode".  Not sure if it is (as I don't use it).
> No, it is not. It lacks unified framework to use as logicla names for
> color use; someting similar to what you have in <h1>, <h2>, ... <h8> in
> html, just as example. Instead people use rgb values directly in their
> packages, and when user changes a theme, packages does not follow. So
> theme engine in Emacs needs a little additional work.
>

In theming, Emacs works with faces, not with colors. Those
would seem to be sufficient logical placeholders for
various types of colors.  But indeed my message suffered
from this confusion, too.


> >  I'm
> > almost always wary of giants or grand reinventions of things.
> > For the "base" Emacs experience that is, in their setups people
> > can use all the ivys, dooms, helms and magits they want.
> I understand your sentiment, but then, you could say this for any
> feature, inclusive fido-mode or icomplete or even find-file.
>

I don't think you can. It's because of their simplicity that they
are much better integrated into Emacs's infrastructure. Compare
the number of lines and the number of configuration options
in fido-mode/icomplete-mode to the same number in those other
packages. These are leaner packages, they follow the existing
infrastructure as much as possible, rather than reinvent it.

But if the complexity comparison isn't satisfying to you, it's easy
to note that changes to the infrastructure, i.e. completion styles,
are "naturally" absorbed by icomplete-mode and fido-mode,
whereas a package such as Helm had to go through great
efforts to support them (reasonably recently).  And Ivy still
doesn't support them, as far as I know. In another example,
multiple reinventions of the "imenu" display frontend, which read
the menu item information directly have failed to account for
recent augmentation of that format.  Fido-mode provides a
different visualization of M-x imenu without suffering from
those problems, playing along with M-x imenu, rather than
re-implemeting it.  Reinventing a parallel infrastructure, easy as
it is to do in Lisp/Emacs, has those very real drawbacks.

Just as an illustration one could argue that "simpler" open-file as
> found in other software packages is what "casual" users would expext.
>

Yes, you can argue that.  I would maybe agree, though I wouldn't agree
we should give those users exactly what they "expect", because they
"expect" VSCode, I guess. But making a custom theme allow such
modifications is what is needed, in my opinion. Then, if I'm mistaken,
enabling that idea is just a few clicks away.

Personally I would like to see ffap being enabled as default ...
>

Don't understand this bit.  I use ffap a lot and don't need to "enable"
anything, just M-x ffap. Is it a mode?

João