On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 10:02:20PM +0200, Thibaut Verron wrote:
> I don't think that I'm the only one with this understanding, see for
> example the earlier post suggesting the name newbie-mode (synonymous
> to beginner-mode for me) with the idea that users would eventually
> grow out of this mode, like training wheels. I don't consider any of
> the suggested settings to be training wheels.
It's the use of the theme (or mode) that's expected to be "grown out
of". As the user progresses they'll discover they like this, but they
don't like that, and now they have to make the choice of whether to
disable the theme and just enable the features they want in their
init.el, or enable the theme and try to disable the features they
don't want in their init.el. I think the latter option is less
desirable and probably harder to achieve.
Perhaps the theme should come with documentation explaining what you
need to add to your init.el to achieve the same effects.
But why is that a good thing? The point as I understand it is that all those features were suggested to be activated by default (some of them are). Because we cannot so easily change the defaults, this mode gives an easy entry point to users wanting those defaults (even if they don't know it yet).
If they were defaults we wouldn't expect the users to explicitly re-add them to their init.el (actually, if we did, there wouldn't be a problem with changing the defaults in the first place). So why treat this mode any differently?
If this mode is implemented, I'd probably go the other route and remove the corresponding settings in my init.el and invoke the mode instead. Just as I would do with anything else I would be doing by hand but now comes built-in, to avoid duplicating the work of maintaining the code.
As for disabling individual features, it's been suggested that the mode offers customization for its individual options, so there shouldn't be any need for elisp to activate or deactivate individual options.