>No-one ever made it a customized variable. I dislike too many customize
>variables,
That's the emacs way ;)
No, it's the custom.el way, which is a part of emacs, and which many users like. Many others don't.
>but I don't oppose this one.
>
But if a variable can be safely changed by the user, then it must be a
custom,
No. Not necessarily. There is, to the best of my understanding, no such orthodoxy in Emacs. Maybe some other maintainer can correct me.
otherwise the variable is intended for internal use
right? So the "good" users assume they shouldn't touch it.
No. The emacs user manual prescribes other ways to change variables, on occasion. There is no such orthodoxy. Putting -- in a variable's prefix is the way to mark it as intended for internal use.
This is why the initial attempt implementation I did for
icomplete-vertical used to check if there were newlines in
icomplete-separator; to respect somehow the user preferences and not add
new customs.
In my experience, that kind of complexity to try to achieve custom.el purity is always unwarranted.
>Users can set non-customizable variables
But are harder to discover. The defcustom infrastructure and the
customize-* functions help us,
There are many means to discover variables and user visible structures. That has been discussed at length here recently, so I won't repeat that discussion.
João