bug#29525: Please don't default to "--unique" mode for Okular

[Reuben Thomas]

On 3 December 2017 at 01:13, Mosè Giordano <address@hidden> wrote:

 

The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that the issue you
raised is sensible but the best solution would be to fix first
upstream in Okular.  It'd be a good improvement.  After that, I'll be
more than happy to remove the --unique option.

I agree that okular should be able to do this.

If you are working with many documents at the same time (say 3-4 or
even more) switching between Emacs and the wanted document can be
really annoying, using C-c C-v brings to focus the right instance of
the viewer.  This is what Evince does and is much more convenient.

I agree, but this is a problem to solve with the window manager, not the application behaviour.

Sometimes, this behaviour of Evince is annoying, because it means I can't have two views of the same documents (as I can in Emacs, ironically!).

 

Please, there is no need to put shame on anyone.

​I apologise, I think this was misinterpreted. When in English we say something is "a shame", this does not mean that anyone should necessarily "be ashamed".

Well, he did suggest you to customize `TeX-view-program-list', *and*
provided you, as a possibility, with two lines of code to add to your
init file to accomplish the same task.  It's up to you to decide
what's best for you.  I really don't see what's the problem here.

​The problem is that this attitude is still common with Emacs package developers, and it hurts users, especially naive users. We should only talk about customizing. Because of this "two ways to do it" attitude we have these problems:

1. Newer users are confused. "Should I use customize or edit .emacs [whatever that is]?"​ No wonder Emacs seems confusing and complicated.

2. We provide inadequate, incomplete or poor-quality customize interfaces (as in the present case) because "well, the user can always edit .emacs instead".

In other programs with a user-editable configuration file, editing the configuration file is a last resort, when there is something that cannot be configured in the preferences dialog, or a bug in the program. This should be true in Emacs too, for all users: customize should be easy for newer users and convenient for advanced users.

Thanks again. At least, as you observed at the start, what I want is possible. However, had I not been an Emacs Lisp programmer, I would have had to ask an expert just to achieve this simple change.

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