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To: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: Custom menus, Tab widget, w3 (was: Re: Argh! Menu bug (I think...))
References: <199703202049.PAA21464@black-ice.cc.vt.edu> <QQchsz06050.199703202218@crystal.WonderWorks.COM>
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From: Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk>
Date: 24 Mar 1997 13:21:32 +0100
In-Reply-To: Kyle Jones's message of Thu, 20 Mar 1997 17:18:37 -0500 (EST)
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Kyle Jones <kyle_jones@wonderworks.com> writes:

> Menus are unavoidably tedious at this level of indirection.  I
> estimate that forty percent of my screen was covered by tiled
> menus by the time I reached the the leaf nodes of ... -> Gnus ->
> Score -> etc.

With Emacs, you only get two level deep before it forces you into a
customize buffer.  With XEmacs, it is your own choice how many levels
you will follow with the menus.

There is also a `custom-menu-create' function you (as an application
developer) can use to create a customize menu for your application.
It takes a group as an argument, and returns a menu definition.
Applications like VM and W3 that defines their own menu bar can put
their own customize menu there, which would give a two level deep menu
for w3.

> Preferences are grouped and presented in small screenfuls, with tabs
> at the top to move to a different group.  Is there some way to get
> this kind of breakdown using Custom?

Wmperry has written a tab widget for w3.  Select 

	Options -> Edit Preferences 

in w3 to see it.  You can use the standard customize widgets like
`custom-variable' and `custom-face', but to make it look really good
you need to use the more primitive widgets like `radio-button' and
`editable-field'.

My opinion: Custom provides a framework where customization options
can be declared separately, and provides a uniform interface to access
all the options.  This is important in an anarchistic system like
(X)Emacs.

However, to provide really good customization support, it is necessary
to describe groups of options together.  This should be done by
applications using w3 in html with the Emacs specific
customization/lisp tags.

