Re: In defense of Customize [was: Trying to right-align my window on startup]

[Christoph Wedler]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

> I think that the problem of an abundance of options should be handled
> otherwise, by better organizing/categorizing (and better design) of
> options, and by better discovery/exploration/navigation tools.

And the "better organizing/categorizing (and better design) of options"
is IMHO a lot of work.  And things become more complex for the design of
a good UI for "user-centric" options if one has to be aware that the
casual user might also change "advanced" user options.

Let me come back to cc-styles.el.  IMHO, a good customization UI would
offer the user to choose a preferred style and a clever possibility to
define their own style (see below).

If users could also "UI-customize" c-hanging-braces-alist directly, the
question arises whether this has preference to the corresponding setting
of the style, what happens if the style / file changes, ...

Now to the customization of a c indentation style:

 - when customizing the indentation style, the user is presented with a
   C++ code snippet which gives direct visual feedback of the chosen
   style

 - to define a style, the user simply changes the indentation of the c++
   code snippet.  Additionally, they can provide some c++ source files
   to adopt the indention engine

This sounds complex enough, and I would not want to think of what should
happen if the user also changes some advanced indentation options.

>> >>  (cus-set 'indent-tabs-mode t)
>> >>  (cus-set 'indent-tabs-mode nil :mode prog-mode)
>>
>> show me the easy code for setting indent-tabs-mode to t in
>> general and to nil in all programming modes.
>
> I'm probably missing your point, but doesn't something like
> this do that?
>
> (setq-default indent-tabs-mode t)
> (add-hook 'prog-mode-hook
>           (lambda () (setq indent-tabs-mode nil)))

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough.  I meant the customization to be robust,
as Stefan pointed out:
 - one can easily remove this setting
 - it works well together with custom themes...

> Personally, it took me a long time to start using Customize.
> I did everything I needed only in Lisp.  Now I use both.
> I am glad to let Customize handle the stuff it is good at.

Yeah.  That was on of the reason why it took me so long to switch from
XEmacs to Emacs.  I wanted to get rid of most customizations (otherwise
I would "shadow" too much of the new good stuff).  And I wanted to do
the customization via custom - actually via hand-written custom-theme
functions.

That being said: I really like Emacs-24.3! I regret not having switched
earlier - most things are really much better.
(Exceptions: mainly dired (+dired-x), and I understand Emacs' policy
towards cl even less than I did before...)

Regards
Christoph