Why not enable font lock by default?

[Jason Spiro]

2007/6/29, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org>:
> Jason Spiro writes:
>
>  > I wonder: why don't you set the default value of
>  > font-lock-auto-fontify to t?  It will help newbies who are just trying
>  > XEmacs for the first time.  Also, even GNU Emacs has nowadays enabled
>  > font lock by default: whoever doesn't want it can disable it manually.
>  >  :)
>
> The big hindrance on 21.4 is that if you have the progress gauge
> widget enabled, you will very likely crash.
>
> I also think most of the font-locking configurations are pretty ugly,
> and have heavily customized my own.  But I'm not prepared to inflict my
> environment on unsuspecting newbies....  So, while I won't veto it if
> somebody else wants to, I am not going to do it myself.

The progress gauge widget works fine for me on the XEmacs 21.4 that
came with FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE.  But I suppose this is a concern that
does affect other people.  Still, perhaps you could auto-enable
font-lock if you detect that the user is running XEmacs 21.5 or
higher?

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