Re: efs and custom

John> I'm curious - how many developers out there have a John> near-minimal base .emacs with all customization possible John> done via customize? That was my goal, and I'm just about John> there, but I'm not sure I like it. Customize didn't understand non-ISO-8859 fonts as of Nov 1999 (and still doesn't AFAIK); I've ripped out all face customizations and replaced them with calls to native face and specifier handling functions. I suspect that it is now more-or-less safe to mix custom and direct handling of faces, but I know it is not perfectly safe, both from list traffic on xemacs-mule and xemacs-mule-ja and from occasional experiments. (When it works, Custom is awf'ly convenient for face manipulations.) I strongly prefer human-readable dot files, even when I normally handle them through a GUI. I also like them divided by application. So BBDB, Edict (not customized well anyway), Supercite, VM, and W3 are all customized via their own dot-files, I generally don't use Custom with them. (Actually, checking my .emacs, a surprising---to me---number of VM and W3 customizations are done via Custom. So I guess a more realistic statement of my actual practice is that when I need to debug customizations, I move them out of Custom and into separate files.) Custom is _not_ a convenient way to debug your .emacs. I can try three different edits of .emacs in the time it takes to find the appropriate variable through Custom (even using M-x customize-variable). Admittedly this is on a P5-120. Also, unless the widget is very carefully written, Custom sucks for working on deeply nested list structure. Even a long vm-auto-folder-alist pushes its limits,[1] and that's a straightforward (REGEXP . STRING) alist. The bottom line, for me, I guess, is that Customize is an excellent way to prototype most customizations, and since most customizations require little debugging, they can stay there. Note, I haven't tried "themes" and such yet. My workhorse XEmacs is currently 21.1.8, so it doesn't have the most advanced Custom stuff, I guess. (My comments regarding non-European faces do apply through 21.2.30, at least.) Footnotes: [1] I haven't explored this deeply. The problem is "interface dissonance," I think. That is, when in Customize, I only want to type new strings and short corrections of existing ones. I want the navigation to be point and click. But what with all the extra decoration in a Customize buffer, the amount of content displayed, even in a 40-line window, is quite small. So I want to `C-x n w' :-), which of course doesn't do anything useful in a Customize buffer. Incremental searches don't feel right, either. What we really need (as has been remarked many times before) is a way to apply "Emacs Lisp" mode only to the region occupied by a s-expression in the Customize buffer. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."