Re: customize objects are in no useful order

[Juri Linkov]

>> emacs -q
>> customize-group basic-faces
>>
>> The faces are not in alphabetical order, or in any other useful order,
>> that I can see.
>
> This is because custom-buffer-sort-alphabetically is nil.
> Maybe it should default to t.  Does anyone object?

Sorry for not objecting to this a month ago, but since it is installed
now (without a ChangeLog entry) I see deficiencies of this change.

After this change, all logically related customizable options whose
defcustom definitions were placed together in the source file, now are
displayed too far from each other in the customization buffer.

For example, look at the query-replace history variables in the
`matching' group.  Before this change, they were displayed one after
another in the same order as they are defined in replace.el.  But now
they have 3 other unrelated options between them in the customization
buffer:

  Query Replace From History Variable: Hide Value query-replace-history
                ============
  Query Replace Highlight: Hide Value Toggle  on (non-nil)

  Query Replace Lazy Highlight: Hide Value Toggle  on (non-nil)

  Query Replace Skip Read Only: Hide Value Toggle  off (nil)

  Query Replace To History Variable: Hide Value query-replace-history
                ==========

which makes it more difficult to find related options.

Even the faces in the `basic-faces' group (the original complaint was
about this group) are now in useless order.  Before this change, they
were logically grouped to different groups in the customization buffer:
text appearance faces, temporarily highlighting faces, frame faces, etc.
There are some irregularities (for example, `secondary-selection' and
`region' are not together, `fixed-pitch' is too far from other related
faces like `bold'), but this order can be fixed by moving defface
definitions in faces.el.

So for options in the customization buffer it is better not to change
the order of option names defined by authors in source files.

What would be useful is to sort only group names, because often
subgroups (except basic subgroups defined in cus-edit.el) are placed
in the customization buffer in quite random order.

Also it is useful to provide a key and menu item to change sorting
order only in the current customization buffer, to make easier for
users to change the order to alphabetical when needed.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/