Re: Customize may not be appropriate for older users

[David Masterson]

>>>>> Francesco Potorti` writes:

> I have a carefully crafted .emacs, and I don't like customise to
> mess with it.

Then set custom-file to some other name so that customize writes there
instead.

> Generally speaking, for each feature I try to find an elisp command
> line to add to my .emacs rather than using customise, and
> unfortunately many new features do not have such documentation.  I
> don't know if there is a way out, but this is a problem that people
> should be aware of.

I know what you mean.  There are several things that would be nice if
customize could do them:

* When writing to custom-file, separate variables/fonts by groups so
  that it is easier to see all things that have been customized for
  (say) hippie-expand.
* Possibly allow customizations to be written group specific customize
  files so that you could decide in your .emacs which ones to load
  (via a list from the master custom-file).

I know about John Wiegley's initsplit, but that does the split based
upon regexps and it's not always obvious which package a variable goes
with.  Basing it on groups might be more appropriate.

-- 
David Masterson                dmaster AT synopsys DOT com
Sr. R&D Engineer               Synopsys, Inc.
Software Engineering           Sunnyvale, CA