What's in the Emacs newcomers-presets theme?
45 points by matklad
45 points by matklad
My only gripe with this is that it is listed among other (regular) themes in Customize. Newcomers will probably not understand that the concept of themes is a bit different in Emacs compared to other text editors they've used before, and that it can be something more than just changing color values. And the fact that you can have multiple themes enabled in Emacs can also be considered odd by a newcomer.
Other than that, a great thing to have in Emacs. Some choices it makes are a bit weird, like enabling the repeat-mode, which, for instance, I, being a Emacs user for quite some years, still find a bit odd at times when it kicks in unexpectedly. I.e., I often switch to a different window with C-x o, and want to type o, and it switches to the next window instead. I mean, I know why it does this, I just don't expect it, because in my mind I'm already in typing mode. Many of the other settings I have in my config, because I find them useful, even not being a newcomer
+1 on being confusing as a theme. Planning to just dump the contents into newcomers.el in my user init and track it with version control. Clean up my init.el and treat newcomers.el as modern defaults file. Comment out anything I don't like in newcomers.el and commit it separately. Every Emacs update, copy/paste the contents back into newcomers.el and see what changed. Keep it rebased below my changes to it.
Per the documentation this is explicitly encouraged:
The functionality enabled by the ‘newcomers-presets’ theme will change between releases of Emacs. We may add new functionality, and also remove old functionality that we think has been superseded. Therefore, if you get used to the newcomers' presets, you should copy them into your own configuration and then disable the theme again. You can use the command ‘copy-theme-options’ to do this.
If you publish the file separately as package, even without (M)ELPA, it'll be helpful to recommend to newcomers and add to my config as a good base.
Emacs themes are more than just colour schemes, and this is a nice opportunity to show that off!
I don't really like that they implemented it as a theme, either. With just color/face themes, it's usually not a good idea to enable multiple themes, so I have a utility function to disable all active themes before loading and enabling another one.
I do like that if I'm ever on a new system, I'll be able to just load the newcomer presets and instantly have saner defaults.