Re: Emacs Installer for MS Windows

[Lennart Borgman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Stefan Monnier" <address@hidden>
To: "Lennart Borgman" <address@hidden>
Cc: "Emacs Devel" <address@hidden>
Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2004 9:58 PM
Subject: Re: Emacs Installer for MS Windows


> > Ok, I believe we think the same way.  What I want to do is just add some
> > things to make it more easy to get started using Emacs for an ms windows
> > user:
>
> > 1) Gnuserv is loaded
> > 2) Some windows specific printing entries to the menus since printing ..
> > 3) I also offer some keyboard tweaks (CUA-mode, swbuff.el tighed to
C-tab) ..
> > 4) recentf.el are also added, most ms windows programs has something
like..
>
> > If no one has a good objection I will load things from default.el then.
> > I will do this by loading one file only from default.el to not clutter
> > default.el.
>
> [ I think changes to the default should be done in Emacs proper rather
than
>   in packages of Emacs.  So I basically disagree with all those changes
>   since they are not intrinsically bound to your package.  I might agree
to
>   changing some of those defaults, but I think we should clearly separate
>   the packaging from the user-preferences.  I.e. keep things as vanilla as
>   possible. ]

I agree that the packaging and user-preferences basically should be
separated. But it is also important to make a more easy road to emacs for an
ms windows user. To turn on all these things above are options at the
installation (except for gnuserv and the printing, see below).

However I realize more clearly after your comments that I should remove some
more of the things I have done.

I think that gnuserv always should be installed. Since I am only using ms
windows (I have never time to switch to Linux) I am not sure how it looks on
other platforms. I believe I read that gnuserv is included there (or
something similar). Is that correct?

> - If printing doesn't work right out of the box, it should be fixed
directly
>   in Emacs.  Fixing it in your package is a bad solution.

I agree. Some time ago I sent a pointer to w32-printing.el that I have
uploaded to http://www.emacswiki.org/. Since I uploaded this I have realized
that I want to change some things in it, but basically it contain what I
believe is an easy and sufficiently good printing solution for Emacs on ms
windows. It does not however have all the options that printing.el have, it
is a much simpler solution. The advantage it has is that it uses the default
windows printing setup. I wrote it simply because I had trouble printing to
the network printers at my job from Emacs. It can print in two ways:
a) Through Notepad using just "notepad.exe /p"
b) Through Internet Explorer. This uses htmlize.el to color the printout.

A user may want to use both this and the postscript printing. Postscript
printing does not work without Ghostview which most users on ms windows does
not have installed. So I believe by default this entry should be hidden on
the file menu, but entries from w32-print.el should be visible. This of
course however makes Emacs a little bit different on ms windows.

> - I don't understand exactly what you mean by "...that they are
customization
>   options".

I mean that you can change them through "Options - Customize Emacs" in the
menus.

> - Assuming a user disagrees with your choice, how is she to revert
>   your changes in her .emacs file?

See above.

> let's say I start your Emacs and see "gee he turned on CUA-mode, that
sucks
> for me".  What do I do?  Normally, to turn CUA off, a user should do
> (CUA-mode -1) or you use custom.  Your site-start.el or default.el changes
> should correctly react to either one of those things.

I turn on the options just as if the user had used "Options - Customize
Emacs" so I do not believe it is a problem.


Please give me more feedback on these things!

- Lennart