Subject: bug#46926: Remove quotes from the highlighted symbols list

From: Aleksandr Petrosyan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:36:00 +0400

Dear all, 

UI designer from KDE/Qt/Maui. 

I agree that there are orthogonal design decisions at play here: quotes indicate that the object is a symbol. Then the link face indicates that it is also something that can be expanded upon. However, the quotes, while useful for “someone in the know”, are distracting in text. 

My preferred solution, would be to use a code face, specifically for symbols and highlight the symbol such that it appears as every other symbol does in emacs lisp. One can inherit the monospace font from GTK to distinguish from documentation text. The link... it can be anything: it could be the documentation for the symbol, or the file which it’s defined in. A user needs to know *exactly* what’s going to happen if they click, so if it’s going to visit e.g. Python.el, and not the documentation of what Python.el is part of, it’s better to say explicitly “visit elisp file”. A button can serve better, but emacs has... ugly buttons and doesn’t use them very consistently, so a link is fine. 

Sincerely 
Aleksandr Petrosyan