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Date: Mon, 23 Dec 1996 22:15:37 -0800
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From: "William M. Perry" <wmperry@aventail.com>
To: Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com>
Cc: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: Re: Planned interface tweaks for beta6/beta33
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Steven L. Baur writes:

>I'm planning two interface tweaks for the next betas.  The first involves
>the display of help.  When you're running an XEmacs full screen height,
>when help is selected the frame is split in half and very frequently you
>end up with a few lines of text and a lot of blanks lines.  Sudish Joseph
>made the suggestion that this might be optimized by calling
>shrink-window-if-larger-than-buffer on the *Help* output window.  I've
>made this change to with-displaying-help-buffer, lisp-complete-symbol and
>apropos-print, and so far I like it.  It definitely makes the display look
>neater.

  Would definitely be nice.  One thing that annoys me is that point is now
put in the help buffer by default - I _HATE_ that.

>The second change shouldn't have much an impact at all.  Currently the
>initial splash screen disappears either after a certain amount time or the
>first keypress.  I cannot think of any reason why there should be a
>timeout on this, particularly since we have no current way to get that
>screen back.  I plan on eliminating the timeout so that the splash screen
>stays up until the first keypress.  I would also like to add an option to
>the help menu to bring the splash screen into a buffer.

  Hmmm - I don't know if I would remove the timeout entirely.  Please do
not add anything to the help menu without first completely revising it.
Emacs-19 has 14 entries in its help menu, and I think that is going a tad
too far.  XEmacs has so many right now that it almost goes off a 1024x768
screen with default fonts, etc. God forbid you try to find something on it
quickly.

  I would suggest removing most of the stuff from the help menu and having
at most 10-12 entries on it.  With most other stuff accessible from either
subsequent screens, or broken out into their own top-level menus.

-Bill P.

