Re: Faces applies to new frames

[Richard M Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    Could be, but currently we don't have any easy way to do it within
    the buffer.  Especially not for minibuffer-only frames which may show
    various buffers, all of them internal.  But yes, it's quite feasible.

The minibuffer window only displays minibuffers.  It would be easy to
set up a face replacement for all the minibuffers.

    The mere fact of changing from per-frame to per-buffer won't solve the
    underlying precedence problem.

It will, in an indirect way.

WIth per-frame face attributes and global face attributes,
there is a tension about which should get precedence.
Suppose the user sets a global face attribute: should that
set the per-frame attribute of all frames that exist?
That is what it does.  But what if a program explicitly set
the per-frame attribute of one frame?  That will be overridden,
and maybe that's wrong.

Now suppose that there are global face attributes and per-buffer
overrides.  There is no such problem any more.  You set the global
face attributes, and that doesn't set anything else that is user-visible.
Any buffer-specific overrides remain in existence and continue to override.
It is totally clear what these things should do.

Really, this is the consequence of replacing a per-X value
with a per-X override.  If we replace per-frame face attributes
with per-frame overrides, we would get this same benefit.
But that change would be messy in other ways.

      But if we get rid of settings coming
    from frame parameters and Xresources,

A clarification.  I don't propose to entirely eliminate the use of X
resources to specify faces.  I just propose to eliminate doing so
in a frame-specific way.

      I currently set the frame to use
    a proportional font (helvetica-like) because it uses a bit less space
    and I find it somewhat nicer to look at, and none of those buffers
    suffer from the usual alignment/filling problems we encounter with
    proportional fonts in Emacs.  Making the setting per-buffer is possible,
    but requires changing the face individually in each buffer, which is
    less satisfactory.

Do these buffers use a particular mode, whose mode hook could set up
the per-buffer override?