theming (was: Sorting of directories in dired)

[John S. Yates, Jr.]

On Thu, 07 Jul 2005 01:28:22 -0700, Edward O'Connor wrote:

>Here's one vote for leaving the default as it is. I love how Emacs
>is a consistent environment across the various operating systems it
>runs on, and would much prefer it for the default Dired behavior to
>continue to be the same across all supported systems.

With all of RMS's push to get the current, little-used theme code
debugged and integrated I keep feeling that it simply will not
address what I intuitively feel a theme concept should provide.
Edward's comment quoted above provides a perfect case in point.

Historically, the Emacs community has provided default behavior
that catered to its entrenched userbase.  The answer to nearly
any suggestion that such behavior might be awkward / unfamiliar /
jarring to new users, especially those on platforms held in low
regard by the entrenched userbase, is that Emacs is customizable.
Essentially a "Let them eat cake" attitude.  The learning curve
and shear volume of customization needed to make Emacs feel
comfortable to a new Windows user (who may very well some day
in the future run Emacs on *nix, but today has no interest in
investing effort in such a potentiality) is daunting.

My notion of a theme is not a named collection of configuration
settings.  Rather it is an expression of high-level intent:

- as much as possible behave like Window / MacOS / *nix
- underline clickable links
- give me single frame behavior vs something like Drew's OneOnOne

This is not unprecedented.  There already seems to be a bit of
this kind of mindset in the attempt to provide light-on-dark and
dark-on-light default faces.

/john