Re: New start up splash screen annoyance...

[Juri Linkov]

>> Not that I can see.  Are you talking about the "Customize
>> Startup" button, which brings up a 50-line customize buffer with
>> eight other sometimes-obscure startup options?  I meant something
>> much simpler: a single "dismiss" button, and a single "make it
>> permanent" checkbox, both on the startup screen itself.
>
> I should have said: for the fancy splash screen only, and provided
> that Emacs was started with an init file.

I think it was a mistake to add a Dismiss checkbox on the startup screen.

I want to remind that the recent changes in startup.el were caused by the
incident when a famous writer lost his invaluable masterpiece because he
finished Emacs without saving text in the *scratch* buffer.  These changes
were intended to not show the *scratch* buffer after Emacs startup.

And now after three months of discussions and changes we returned to the
initial situation: the Dismiss button invites Emacs users to easily disable
the startup screen.  I'm sure almost every Emacs beginner will be tempted
to press it.  As a result, they will see the *scratch* buffer after startup,
and again will lose their texts typed in this buffer.

The *scratch* buffer is mostly intended for the seasoned Lisp hackers,
and should be shown on the startup only when explicitly configured by
the corresponding option to show the *scratch* buffer.  Ideally, starting
Emacs without command line arguments should display the startup screen
by default and without providing a checkbox to disable it, but starting
Emacs with file name arguments should display only the specified files.

I understand that adding the Dismiss checkbox was caused by the annoying
behavior of displaying the startup screen instead of files when starting
Emacs with file name arguments.  However, this is a completely separate case
and should be treated by different means.  Perhaps we should add a separate
user option to disable the startup screen only for the case of starting
Emacs with file name arguments, and to display the Dismiss button only
in this case (unless Richard will agree to some other less annoying way
of displaying the help information with file name arguments).

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/