Re: Some developement questions

[hw]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: hw <address@hidden>
>> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden
>> Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2018 03:31:18 +0200
>> 
>> >> (setq Man-width 75)
>> >
>> > Emacs nowadays calculates the width dynamically, depending on the
>> > dimensions of the window.
>> 
>> Why not make Emacs dynamically size it's windows to the width of the
>> display first? ;~O
>> 
>> <Rant>
>> 
>> Yes, Emacs can do that since a while, and has made it an extremely
>> annoying default.  Who wants to read manual pages or other text when it
>> has been formatted to be about 140--300 characters per line wide (and
>> way more than that if my eyes were what they used to be)?
>> [...]
>> This is a good example for a default that really should be changed.
>
> Feel free to file a bug report about it.

Hm, ok, I did that (no response yet).  Let's see what happens.

>> Think of what Ergus pointed out in his last post[1] about the
>> difficulties users and Emacs are experiencing:
> [...]
>> + get nothing to work
>
> I agree that practical steps towards helping new users is something
> that are very welcome.

How about getting new users in the first place?  Ergus is right that
Emacs is not the default editor --- I always have to explicitly install
it and it always annoys me that it isn't installed by default for any of
Centos, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora.  Ubuntu and arch probably don't have a
good default, either.  Instead, you always need to guess which editor
might be installed unless you installed one, and that is usually at
least vi, which I don't get along with.

I wouldn't know how to sway who ever decides what is being installed by
default in any of these distributions to make Emacs a default.  One
reason for it not to be the default may be that it makes for somewhat
large packages maybe.  It is questionable if that should still be a
concern nowadays.

Imagine that, it may even be the only reason.  And it remains that way
only because nobody thought about it yet.