RE: Use faces to indicate states in Customize?

["Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

       (each entry here is (1) proposed text, (2) state, (3) current
       text, (4) doc string text from `custom-magic-alist'):

    The entries you give for (4) to not seem to correspond either to
    today's recent or yesterday's values of `custom-magic-alist'.

No, they are older - sorry for any confusion in that regard. The exact text
is not relevant to my point, however.

My point was to continue to provide info such as that in (3) and (4), but to
do so only upon request (e.g. via tooltip), in order to reduce the text
displayed for each custom option.

There are relatively few custom "states". A long description of each state
need not be repeated each time the state is mentioned. My idea is to use 1)
only a short name (label) at each state occurrence and 2) a "legend" that
accurately describes what each such label stands for.

The legend could be in a centralized location (e.g. buffer bottom) and could
describe all of the states (once), or it could be available only upon demand
and be split up, as a set of individual tooltips for the state names. I
prefer the latter, but either is better than repeating a description at each
occurrence, IMO.

The other part of my idea is to use color to make the states easier to
distinguish when scanning.