Why do all the XEmacs defaults suck? (was Re: Why using (push-mark) ?)
SL Baur writes:
The basic question as Martin has raised it to me in conversation
over
the phone, is why do all the defaults suck? `xemacs -vanilla' stinks.
If there is anyone who can stand editing in an `xemacs -vanilla'
environment for any time longer than to reproduce a bug someone has
reported, please speak up, otherwise let's have some discussion on
changing defaults around.
Mostly they don't suck. When I look at my own .emacs file, I see changes
in the defaults that are largely to account for local conditions. I'm
half-blind so I need large fonts. A dark background is easier on my eyes
than a light background. The path from / to my home direrctory is very
long so I set insert-default-directory to nil to avoid the line wrap in
the minibuffer. Turd files in system directories are viewed dimly by the
management so make-backup-files gets set to nil. And so on. There's a
lot of this sort of thing.
Then there are the I-like-Emacs-the-way-it-was curmudgeon settings.
mouse-yank-at-point gets set to t because I like Emacs in an xterm and
Emacs in a X window to behave the same. enable-recursive-minibuffers
gets set to t because I know what I'm doing. dired-do-highlighting and
dired-do-interactive-permissions both get set to nil because the colors are
(were?) unreadable with a dark background and it was more expedient to
turn them off than to customize the colors. ESC ESC is bound to
eval-expression. help-selects-help-window gets set to nil because The
Emacs Way is to use C-M-v. And so on. There's a handful of these.
I can and have done without all of it except the stuff related to my
poor vision. That stuff I have to set or suffer headaches, and neck
and back pain.
As you have probably figured out by now, that I LIKE EMACS.