Re: Representation of the Emacs userbase on emacs-devel

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 03.09.2021 14:19, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > Again you try to change any discussion of a change into an "addition".
> > Something that wouldn't change anything in the default behavior.
>
> Because I think that's a much better way forward, in the long run.
> But if you want to insist on changing the defaults without the opt-in
> changes first, I guess we will be having this discussion many times in
> the future.

That is just side-stepping the question. There was never any 
disagreement about opt-in changes, and when it is feasible, we of course 
have taken that route.

> > What's so peculiar about changing the behavior that flies in the face of
> > existing practice in all programming languages out there? And which
> > causes confusion in new users?
> >
> > The way it is implemented made sense decades ago, but these days even
> > users who want tabs for indentation are surprised by Emacs behavior in
> > this area (because most of those users want 1 tab to mean 1 indentation
> > level).
>
> You tried convincing in this before, and you failed.

That discussion is a great example of the problems I wrote about in this 
thread: we don't pay any attention to polls, hard statistics, articles 
and user posts (of which I produced plenty).

A few folks say "I don't like", and that's the end of it.

> IME, at least on
> my daytime job, source code produced by people these days with popular
> IDEs (not Emacs) includes TABs.

Does it include tabs in the same fashion as what is produced by Emacs? 
Which actually mixes tabs and spaces.

> So at least my experience disagrees
> with yours.  Which might explain why this change didn't happen.

I wasn't just listing my experience.

> Someone suggested to have "themes" in Emacs which could change the
> defaults of many settings in one simple command.  Why not invest the
> energy we waste in these endless discussions in making that happen?
> It at least would make the changes easier for newbies, if nothing
> else.

A few reasons. I don't really want to make Emacs more complex than it 
is. I usually strive to make the existing workflows simpler. There are 
only so many hours in a day.

Further: what kind of theme would include indent-tabs-mode set to nil? A 
theme called 'Sane Defaults'?

The users would need to find out about it somehow and then enable 
anyway, so what would make it different from having a custom option 
called indent-tabs-mode, which we have already?