Re: Representation of the Emacs userbase on emacs-devel

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: philipk@posteo.net, rms@gnu.org, john@yates-sheets.org,
>  danflscr@gmail.com, monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2021 13:34:38 +0300
> 
> On 03.09.2021 09:28, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > That's only true for changes of the default behavior, and key bindings
> > are examples of such a change, at least the way they are proposed.
> > There was talk about introducing a minor mode which would then be free
> > to make controversial changes, including key bindings, but no one
> > stepped forward to write such a mode.  Which I think is a pity, given
> > how easy it should be to do that, and how many problems and
> > frustrations it could potentially solve.
> 
> Again you try to change any discussion of a change into an "addition". 
> Something that wouldn't change anything in the default behavior.

Because I think that's a much better way forward, in the long run.
But if you want to insist on changing the defaults without the opt-in
changes first, I guess we will be having this discussion many times in
the future.

> > indent-tabs-mode is an existing option, so your insistence on turning
> > it on by default in the face of resistance is ... peculiar.  We did
> > turn it on in some of our sources.
> 
> Turning it off by default.
> 
> What's so peculiar about changing the behavior that flies in the face of 
> existing practice in all programming languages out there? And which 
> causes confusion in new users?
> 
> The way it is implemented made sense decades ago, but these days even 
> users who want tabs for indentation are surprised by Emacs behavior in 
> this area (because most of those users want 1 tab to mean 1 indentation 
> level).

You tried convincing in this before, and you failed.  IME, at least on
my daytime job, source code produced by people these days with popular
IDEs (not Emacs) includes TABs.  So at least my experience disagrees
with yours.  Which might explain why this change didn't happen.

Someone suggested to have "themes" in Emacs which could change the
defaults of many settings in one simple command.  Why not invest the
energy we waste in these endless discussions in making that happen?
It at least would make the changes easier for newbies, if nothing
else.