Re: Making Emacs more newbie friendly

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Shawn Betts <sabetts@vee-see-en.bee-see.see-a> writes:

> nfreimann <niels_freimann@yahoo.de> writes:
>
>> cvs gtk2 emacs takes that into consideration. Again thanks you to
>> the cvs gtk2 emacs developers, the nqemacs people, and those
>> responsible for the windows version in general.
>
> I fail to see how changing the toolkit is going to magically
> modernize Emacs. Is it just the anti-aliased fonts and theme
> conformance? Is that *all* it takes to turn a program from crusty
> and ancient to modern and up-to-date?

It is not all.  But the awful pseudographical look that consistently
does not fit in with whatever environment you place it in is one of
the major turnoffs of XEmacs for me.  It is so Emacs-19ish: it _tries_
looking like an application created for graphical display and has all
the features, but it all looks wrong, crude, garish.

My GTK+ version of Emacs, in contrast, is rather nice.  Even the
toolbar, while a waste of space, fits in nicely as long as you don't
use Gnus (in which case it turns into a retro-yuk nightmare).  I had
to sacrifice the shiny GTK+ toolbars, though: like almost any toolkit
toolbar except Athena, they are visual toys not useful for actual
work.  --without-toolkit-tool-bars, along with some X resources to get
the size and colors of the non-toolkit bars right, solves that problem
with a definite negative impact on the overall visual impression.

I would like to see a runtime option to replace toolkit scrollbars
with the non-toolkit version, though: that would mean that I don't
need to compile my own Emacs at one time.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum