Re: AW: Same coloring as GNU Emacs not possible due to fewer face types
On Wed, 04 Dec 2002, stephen(a)xemacs.org wrote:
Joachim> My question is not about usability of color-theme
Joachim> together with XEmacs, it is about the number of faces.
Number of faces is not a problem. There are _far_ too _many_ faces.
The problem is that each application defines its own, even though they
could be reused (in XEmacs; it's possible that GNU Emacs doesn't
support a flexible-enough inheritance scheme). Tracking down all that
information is a massive and mostly profitless pain in the neck, which
is why neither the upstream authors nor XEmacs maintainers like to do
it.
Each application, or class of application should be using a common set
of faces.
The problem here is that using faces across application classes
would be confusing, arbitrary, and difficult.
For example, most of the language 'applications' modes use
font-lock-comment-face for comments. Some language modes add more faces
for language specific features (cperl-array-face)
But there are other applications like dired that has sockets,
executable files, links (etc). How would you combine 'dired' faces
with the 'language' faces?
-jeff