Design Is Hard

This isn’t about the pixel pushing kind of design, but the engineering one. Given a problematic matter, what choices do you make to create a tool that enables its user to effectively interact another object? More importantly, how do you deal with choices that are hard to rectify afterwards? While this is going to be a rant, the subject is one of my more popular Emacs packages, Shackle. I thought the 1.0.0 release of it with a new debugging facility to make troubleshooting easier is just the right moment to ponder a bit about those choices I made and why I regret some of them.

You may wonder “Wait, what is wrong with Shackle? It has over a hundred stars of GitHub, a few thousand downloads on MELPA, dozens of people using it in their init files and a handful of people recommending it to others.”. While all of this is true, it’s not all roses. I occasionally get issues from users that don’t understand it at all and I can’t really blame them. There is a fundamental mismatch going on here because all this package does is hijacking the display-buffer-alist variable to invent a similar, but not quite as powerful mechanism on top of it. It’s an inherently leaky abstraction which makes for less than ideal debugging: If it ever breaks down, you’ll have to understand both the abstraction and the underlying code it’s built upon.

This project started off with me not understanding how to use this variable at all. In hindsight, this should have been the first warning signal: If you can’t fully understand the problem, don’t expect to solve it in a satisfactory manner. There are a few glaring problems with display-buffer-alist:

Now, does Shackle do better? Well, it does in some ways while being worse in others:

The bottom line is that I’m not happy with Shackle’s design, but am wise enough to keep it as is and not do any more invasive changes. My happiness (or the lack of) isn’t worth risking the happiness of its users.