Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rpi!rpi.edu!tale From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs Subject: Re: [romero@csseq.tamu.edu (Ron Romero): bug in slowsplit.el ] Message-ID: Date: 8 May 89 19:38:26 GMT References: <4139.610638315@chips> Sender: usenet@rpi.edu Reply-To: tale@pawl.rpi.edu Distribution: gnu Lines: 52 In-reply-to: jr@CHIPS.BBN.COM's message of 8 May 89 13:45:15 GMT In article <4139.610638315@chips> jr@CHIPS.BBN.COM (John Robinson) writes: jr> What I had hoped to do was to merge my code into the distributed code jr> for split-window-vertically and delete-other-windows, and make it jr> conditional on a global customization variable, and perhaps also the jr> search-slow-speed variable. I haven't gotten any further bug reports, jr> so maybe it is time to do this. (Any other suggestions out there?) Sure, and I'm posting rather than mailing because it brings up other questions. I would say that delete-other-windows can be fset to delete-other= windows-quietly without any problems; however, the same is not true of split-window-vertically and split-window-quietly. Some elisp programmers rely on the behaviour of -vertically that _always_ puts the point in the top window and _always_ leaves the value of point alone. The same is not true of -quietly which will make the selected window either top or bottom and possibly move point if it was where the new modeline is. I like -quietly very much for interactive use, but it is not a replacement for -vertically. (As an example, try (fset 'split-windows-vertically 'split-windows-quietly) and then running GNUS. The behaviour of selecting an article to be read starts having major problems as soon as you get to a point where -quietly wants to put you in the bottom window of the split.) The other questions involved deal with how code that is generally considered useful by Emacs users actually gets into the distribution. 18.54 saw the addition of a bunch of stuff for BBN equipment -- good, even if I don't have any. There are other things, though, like Dave Gudeman's and Bruce Israel's minibuf.el for completion, three different functions for filenamer completion anywhere in Emacs, two different packages for browsing the kill ring, Kyle Jones' crypt.el, Joe Wells' and Lynn Slater's significant improvements to apropos, and other packages that I am sure are pretty widely found to be useful. (I'd still like to know which pascal-mode is better, too.) So how do we convince RMS to include some of this stuff in the distribution? Just ask? (Somewhat novel idea for me; I haven't tried it.) Petition? I, for one, would like to see it be included in the regular distribution. For some reason I feel a compelling need to have a lengthy USAGE file in ~emacs/local that explains how to use all of the non-distributed lisp and I really rather just like to see it documented and added to ~emacs/lisp (I'll even do some documenting.) For example, it is the opinion of eveyone to whom I have showed minibuf.el that it should be the default behaviour of Emacs. I haven't done it in site-load though because I like present Emacs as sanctioned by Richard Stallman and let people know that the other stuff isn't officially GNU. So the question remains: how do we get it sanctioned? Dave -- tale@rpitsmts.bitnet, tale%mts@itsgw.rpi.edu, tale@pawl.rpi.edu