> Fair enough. Different strokes for different folks. We agree. That was one of my points. I don't claim that my own use of Emacs binaries is the only use or is typical.
> > What's the big deal about creating a shortcut? Why is that > > harder than running some "installer"? I find unzipping and > > (optionally) creating a shortcut sans effort and sans > > surprises - painless. > > Because the installer is one-click (well not really but you > don't have anything to remember) and then you're up and > running. Only if you want *all* of what it changes by default. As soon as you start picking and choosing - even to obtain just a standard, unaltered GNU Emacs build, you have left the one-click installation scenario. And then you need to know what you're choosing and how to interpret the installer dialog etc. > I admit the shortcut thing should not irk me as > much as it does, but there are too many options for me to > always remember, and at least in the old days, it was hard to > get exactly right and -a didn't work so you had to write a > little .bat file and use that. Maybe that's all behind us > now. Partly it's because I'm an old-school Linux guy and all > this emacs vs. runemacs and emacsclient vs. emacsclientw > stuff isn't burned into my brain enough to remember when I'm > setting up a new system. I understand. But you probably only have to learn _once_ what it is that you want, and then just repeat that each time afterward. If you always use the same thing then there is only one thing to remember. And if you always use the same thing then you can just update your existing shortcut to point to the new binary location. And if the location does not change (e.g. you need only one build) then you need not do ANYTHING more than unzip the new zip file to the same location - your shortcut need not change at all. > I admit that although I've been using Emacs since 1982, > submitted patches, and written thousands of lines of elisp, > I'm at the point now where I just want it to work without > fuss on a new machine - my focus is elsewhere. Guess I'm > getting lazy. :-) Again, I'm with you. But you might have fewer surprises by sticking with a vanilla GNU Emacs build. Just a suggestion. > How about if Emacs shipped with a bin/EmacsClient.lnk > shortcut with the right options already in it? Hmm, don't > think that would work -- .lnk files have the install dir > baked into them. Or maybe addpm.exe could create it. Use `M-x report-emacs-bug' to offer such suggestions to the Emacs developers. That command is for enhancement requests in addition to bug reports.
