Re: NeXTStep port preferences

[Benjamin Riefenstahl <b.riefenstahl@turtle-trading.net>]

Hi Adrian,


First-off, thanks for putting energy and time into this.

Adrian Robert writes:
> Some users differ.  There are many use cases calling for frequent
> font and/or modifier key changes.  We'd need a poll to get better
> data.

Right.  BTW, re modifiers, at least with a German keyboard, having Opt
as Meta by default is not a good idea.  I need that modifier to insert
important characters like ~ @ \ [ ] { }, so it's not really free.

> 'geometry' is split into Width, Height, Top, Left entries.  If
> changing this to geometry and possibly using an X11-compatible
> string would be better, a patch is welcome.

I see.  For Emacs users coming from other platforms, I think it would
be better to mimic the X resources approach here.

> Benjamin Riefenstahl <b.riefenstahl <at> turtle-trading.net> writes:
>> - The font setting mechanism doesn't work unless an Emacs frame is
>> selected.  This used to be documented in the readme, but it is
>> still a bug.
>
> Another long-standing TODO fallen victim to more urgent tasks.  Help
> is welcome.

I had a look at this, but I failed so far to make much progress,
because I don't know enough about NextStep/Cocoa.

>> - The callbacks that the Cocoa dialogs call are not protected in a
>> catch block.  If they run into an error, Emacs aborts without a
>> visible error message.
>
> I've never had a bug report on this, but if it's an easy fix we
> should do it.

I just checked my facts.  Emacs runs into an abort when
ns-save-preferences throws an error.  Ns-respond-to-change-font, the
callback for the font panel, seems to be ok.

I noticed the problem when I was changing the code and introduced my
own bugs in ns-save-preference, but than you never know what errors
might occur in real life.

>> It is not easy to be maintained anywhere.  As you notice, it is
>> broken even now, and only part of that is bit-rot.
>
> This is a bit harsh.

Maybe. 

> It has been part of Emacs.app for years and has had few problems.

Just above we are talking about at least two long-standing bugs that I
noticed in just a bit of trying it out and fixing a simple bug (BTW
you might want to look at that, it's at
<http://emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=578>,
with patch).

> Also you are the first person to mention anything negative about the
> appearance.  On the other hand there have been many positive
> comments from users.

Sorry, that may just be my personal impression.  Ignoring aesthetics,
the one usability thing that I noticed was that I would have liked to
see which default font is currently selected before opening the font
panel.

>> > Otherwise, at least in this case, there's no real reason not to
>> > just use the X11 version on OS X
>> 
>> [...] missing features (e.g. does DnD work from Finder to Emacs?).
>
> It would be far easier to add these features to Apple's X11 impl
> than to port and maintain a separate interface to GNU Emacs.

It would?  I didn't know it was even possible to do this kind of thing
using documented interfaces.


benny