Re: Consistent vanilla Emacs

[Stefan Kangas]

Hi Nicolas,

"Nicolas P. Rougier" <address@hidden> writes:

> I've been working on making vanilla Emacs (i.e. no packages installed) more
> consistent and elegant in terms of faces/colors/fonts/size. You can see some
> screenshots at https://github.com/rougier/elegant-emacs.

Thank you for working on this.  As I've already told you in private, I
like some of the fundamental ideas in your proposal, and think it has a
fresh look we could definitely use in GNU Emacs itself.

Of course, there are some details we need to work out, technically and
in terms of what information to present to the user.[1]  RMS has said we
need to include copying and warranty information on the splash screen,
for example.  There are also considerations of aesthatics and
consistency.

For background, there is a thread on a better splash screen here:

    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-04/msg01733.html

> These mockups have been made using org-mode. Probably this can be made
> differently and more efficiently but I'm not too familiar with Emacs internal.

I think making a prototype in Org-mode is not a bad idea.  But we can't
load Org-mode by default, because it is too big and would increase
startup times.  So eventually we will need to write patches for Emacs
which produce the desired results.

I will try to find the time to study your proposal more fully in the
next couple of days.  Here are some initial observations from the
screenshots:

1. Currently, the consensus seems to be that the menu and tool bar are
   important to have.  So we can't disable them by default.  We would
   like to make them look better though, but I don't know if there is
   any work being done on that.

2. You seem to have moved the mode-line to the top.  I don't have an
   opinion of that yet.

3. We currently don't ship any fonts with GNU Emacs.  Maybe we should
   consider doing that?  It seems to me that many other applications do.
   Or maybe we should introduce a stronger set of default fonts for
   different systems.

4. I like the margins you set on the windows.  But it is less efficient
   than not using them, because you can see less text on your screen.
   That makes me doubt that it's a good choice functionally, even if it
   is aesthetically pleasing.  Is there an option to enable this only
   for certain buffers?

(BTW, your `elegant.el' includes things like setting `indent-tabs-mode'
to nil.  Could you please separate those parts from the graphical
changes?  For example by moving them to a separate file.  That will
facilitate this discussion, I think.)

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas

Footnotes:
[1] Nicolas has agreed to sign the copyright assignment papers, and has
     been sent the form to get the process started.