Re: two or more lines of icons

Uwe> I just want to point out that there is feature rich Uwe> application like Xemacs and most beginners are not willing to Uwe> use it because it does not feel right. It is pointless to Uwe> discuss this with them. I certainly agree that there are good reasons for providing a crippled (more politely, "restricted" or "refactored") interface, one of them being getting potential contributors into the community. We programmers tend to forget that people who don't even like programming can make contributions (like bug reports and documentation, and lobbying their programmer friends to work on XEmacs). However, doing a UI well is a _huge_ amount of effort. I think that Olivier's criticisms of the kile interface would be valid for new users as well as for expert user/developers like Olivier. If XEmacs is going to provide such a "skin", we are going to do it well. We ("the project") encourage you ("those who think an XEmacs that could appeal to newbies is a good thing", not limited to or even necessarily including Uwe) to start mocking up proposed interface(s). By that I mean (1) Find a bunch of icons that conform to the toolbar form factor (28x28 pixels) -- any reason image program can be used to force the form factor, we'll worry about "aspect ratio" and "beauty" when we actually start distributing such a thing. (2) Then use edit-toolbar to create the toolbar, either with real commands or with stubs (defun newbie-toolbar-cut-command () (interactive "r") (message "Using newbie-toolbar-cut-command to cut the current region")) (3) Menus are harder, but you could fake the layout with outline-mode. (4) Round up "focus groups" of newbies and see how they like it. (5) Send an RFE to xemacs-design with reports on the focus group and a request for actual implementation help. (6) It had better be doable in Lisp, or it's not right. (You can ask for new generic features to support new functionality, of course, but for the start stick to features that can be implemented using existing Lisp functions.) So you/we can package it. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.