At 09:27 AM 6/16/00 -0700, you wrote:
>It's nice to be able to customize jde on a per project
>basis.
>The typical things one customizes across projects are
>classpath settings
>--and less frequently things like template generators.
>
>However as set up at present
>one is either forced to navigate through the custom point
>and click interface which is suboptimal to those of us used
>to updated a lisp variable;
>on the other hand because the proj.el file holds all the
>project customizations, edititng that file by hand is not
>very pleasant.
>
Hi Raman,
It may be suboptimal for some users but it is certainly optimal for me, as
the JDE's author, in that custom has practically eliminated a major source
of tech support email to this list, namely people setting JDE variables to
the wrong type of value, e.g., to a string when a list of strings is
required. Interestingly, the people who complain the most about having to
use customize, namely Emacs "experts," are the most prone to this type of
error because they are the least likely to consult the doc for a variable.
They just blithely set it to the type that they know must be right because
of their expertise. I consider myself an Emacs expert and probably more
knowledgable than any about the settings of JDE variables. Nevertheless, I
am grateful for customize. It has eliminated the need for me to remember
the data types required by the countless JDE variables and has also
eliminated Lisp errors caused by typos. The extra time required to set the
variables via custom is more than offset by the savings in time require to
ensure that the Lisp code is correct or finding bugs caused by incorrect
Lisp code.
Regards,
- Paul
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