Re: IDE

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 10/10/2015 05:25 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> It's standard software engineering practice, why should you ask for
> its justification?

I'm asking for details. Again, to further the discussion.

"Let's unify features X, Y and Z" is not necessarily the standard 
practice. It all depends on the exact features and how they are used.

I've also given a few general reasons why a "big design" might be 
suboptimal: more engineering effort needed, the result is likely to turn 
out to be less flexible, and a significant number of users might prefer 
to use only some of the parts.

For instance, because we don't provide support for some feature in their 
environment (e.g. refactoring for Ruby), or because they already have a 
satisfactory solution for the feature in question. And as you know, some 
users dislike changing their habits.

> They look nicer.  I don't know how to explain better.

I would expect something akin to a normal bug report (enumerating things 
we're missing). But never mind.

> The other IDEs use something similar to a tooltip, or a drop-down menu
> with different fonts and colors.

You can already customize colors and fonts user for the Company popup. 
But if you end up using fonts with different dimensions, of course, that 
would result in jagged display.

I'd be happy to use a "native" tooltip in Emacs, but didn't have time to 
fully investigate it yet. However, there's a third-party package called 
pos-tip which tries to provide a "show tooltip" interface based on 
x-show-tip. From trying it out, I have the following complaints about 
x-show-tip capabilities:

- It's background rendering is inconsistent. As an example, the first 
time I evaluate (tooltip-show "abc") in an Emacs session, the background 
is yellow-ish. The next time, and after that, the background is black.
- Is there a way to show several tooltips at once? To display different 
elements of the completion UI side by side.
- If a tooltip is displayed, and I Alt-Tab to another program's window, 
the tooltip remains on top. This is by far the most annoying one.