Re: Aquamacs distro for OS X like behavior

[David Reitter]

On 4 Apr 2005, at 18:47, David Kastrup wrote:

> There is considerable leeway in those goals.  For example, different
> file selection dialogs and similar are quite common, and in fact, the
> whole widgetry stuff (like customize and co) could be made to make use
> of the native widgets where available.

From a UI and an OS X perspective, customization buffers should 
definitely go into proper dialogues with native widgets.

> Well, we do have something like customization themes IIRC, but I don't
> know their extent and how they are used.  If a whole set of defaults
> were to be changed by a single theme (and could be changed back at
> will), then an out-of-the-box configuration that was different on
> MacOSX would be quite tolerable.

I don't know if an out-of-the-box configuration for the default Emacs 
is needed - the idea of a distribution like what we demonstrate with 
Aquamacs might already do the job. People with other needs - a 
cross-platform compatible Emacs - will then be happy to use the 
'conservative' version instead.

I see a trend towards the first - UI integration - because it's more 
comfortable when you use a lot of applications (and people use more 
applications, not less), and there has been a great uptake on mobile 
devices: people use laptops much more than they used to (say, 7 years 
ago), and people don't switch from one system to another as often. Of 
course, individual mileage will vary!

Either way, merely using a 'theme' with the on-board means, for example 
to make customization buffers look different, will IMHO not tweak the 
application UI enough. A user interface is more than just pretty 
buttons and a choice of colors. If you look at the way themes work in 
GNOME / KDE, you'll find huge emphasis on the graphics, and only little 
theme-defined behavior and pretty much no theme-defined layout.

Successful OS X software pretty much always uses the native user 
interface. Even though OS X has superb Java integration (at least for 
not-quite-cutting-edge Java versions), we don't see many wide-spread 
Swing based applications. Similarly, the XUL based browser versions 
from Mozilla aren't as popular as Safari and Camino - even though they 
offer good or better functionality.

Consequently, I'm arguing for native widgets wherever possible. For a 
new project - or one with less tradition and less importance, there is 
stuff like wxWidgets. In this case, I would be grateful if someone 
would implement more Carbon (or Cocoa) based UI stuff, and if better 
internal interfaces existed, for example to handle scrollbars 
correctly. This is stuff only developers experienced with Emacs code - 
yes, you! - can implement.

- Dave