Re: BIKESHED: completion faces

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: João Távora <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 9 Nov 2019 13:29:30 +0000
> Cc: Ergus <address@hidden>, Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden>,
>  Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>, emacs-devel <address@hidden>
> 
> > It's up to you, but I think an option that causes the matched part to
> > be prominent and the next character to type not prominent (which is
> > AFAIU what you want) is much easier and lightweight for users than
> > loading a theme or customizing a face.
> 
> I do believe loading a theme is much simpler than asking the
> user to set an option for such a minute aspect. I load themes
> because I trust many such good decisions of the theme's
> author: I don't want to worry about individual ones.  If I ever do,
> I'll customize a face. Faces and variables that control
> application of faces are, in my humble opinion of course,
> crazy. Even for Emacs :-)

I think you are looking at this from the implementation POV.  From
users' POV, an option (or a minor mode) is a better way when we are
talking not just about changing colors and other face attributes, but
about changing behavior in significant ways.  In this case, what is
implemented via faces changes the behavior, because a face prominently
different from the default becomes like the default, and another face
makes the reverse transformation.  Think of this as a binary mode that
makes either the first-difference or the common part prominent:
flipping a variable is an easily understood and easily discovered way
of getting each user the behavior he/she wants.

By contrast, loading a theme or customizing 2 faces in coordinated way
is much less discoverable and much more complex.

So I think providing an option is better then telling users to
customize themes or faces.  It also has a clear and simple path for
becoming the default in the future.  Thus, it is IMO a compromise that
should leave us happier than the all-or-nothing kind of solution that
you are defending.