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Re: Change terminology to better align users’ experience with modern GUI


From: MBR
Subject: Re: Change terminology to better align users’ experience with modern GUIs
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 09:11:00 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.8.0

I see this as the Emacs equivalent to the efforts to get the U.S. to switch from the English system of measurement to the Metric system. And we all know how well that has gone.

Once a community has been using core terminology for an extended period of time, the only way to change it is to completely replace the members of the community. And doing that would kill Emacs itself, which would make the notion of changing the terminology irrelevant.

   Mark Rosenthal

On 7/23/19 9:00 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
IMO in my ideal world, there should be no division between `window' and
`buffer', the difference should be abstracted away so that users don’t
have to know the `window' notion at all.
I don't see how that would even be possible.
Indeed.  A given window can show display different buffers at different
times, and a buffer can be displayed in any number of buffers at any one
time, so the two are really quite different.

Changing the `window' term to `pane' or something else seems like
a low-hanging fruit for people who would like to try using Emacs; I’m
interested/curious on other people’s opinions about this.
This could be helpful, but there are a *lot* of function names using
'window'. That means adding a lot of aliases for backwards
compatibility.
Yes, we discussed doing such a change a few years back (renaming window
to pane, and then renaming frame to window), but since those names
appear as part of functions's and variables's names, it implies
a massive renaming.  In order not to break external packages and users's
configs, the old names would still have to be preserved as aliases for
many years (meaning that there would need to be many years between the
renaming of windows to panes and the subsequent renaming of frames to
windows).

I think "many years" above can be estimated at about of 10 years (there
are still several important packages which consider it important to
be compatible with Emacs<23 and Emacs-23 was released 10 years ago).

So the way I see it, we're talking about 20 years of transition.
That makes "pane" rhyme with "pain".


         Stefan






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