Re: [PATCH] lisp/bookmark.el: make bookmark-fontify nil by default

[Stefan Kangas]

[That was in May.]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
> > Please don't make this change until you hear from Lars, who examined
> > the original patch and decided to install it.  It doesn't get more
> > "considerate" than that.
>
> It does seem to be an unexpectedly (to me, at least) controversial
> change, so perhaps it should be tweaked.  For instance, using fringe
> markers (on frames that support that) instead of highlighting the entire
> line, or something else that isn't that stark.

This discussion sort of fizzled out with everyone, as far as I can
tell, mostly agreeing that a fringe marker or similar might be better
for the default behaviour.  On master, bookmark-fontify is still t,
and the highlighting is still done by changing the background colour.

In general, I think we are sometimes too cautious with turning on
so-called "bells and whistles", so I'm actually in one sense happy to
see that a useful new feature is enabled by default.  Yet I'm a little
surprised that this particular feature happened to pass the bar.

I personally find that highlighting the entire line is fairly
distracting, and I'm concerned that this is not a good new default
behavior.  If I'm wrong, and long-time users of bookmark.el thinks
this change is great, then that's fine of course.  But just in case
I'm right, perhaps we could wait with setting the default to t until
Emacs 29?  That way we have a chance to wait for the new less
intrusive fringe marker feature, which sounds harder to have many
reservations about.

WDYT?