A skinnable phone/desktop 42S emulator (aside from Free42/Plus42)

[rprosperi]

It's good that you've shared what you're planning, as indeed many folks here were interpreting things the way Eric did, which it now appears is not the case.

While I've not evaluated the usefulness of you proposed skin for my own use, it is clear lots of thought went into it. How useful such a non-standard approach is to a Free42/Plus42 user is a totally subjective thing and cannot be predicted well or generalized.

All that said, I have to agree with Thomas' decision. Free42 is designed specifically to emulate the UI/UX of the 42S and that includes all the intended and unintended cases of pressing the E key; introducing non-standard behavior would lead to bug reports and criticism that it's broken, as the compliance test is try the same action on a 42S.

Suggesting that few or no people would notice the proposed E change is also disingenuous at worst, or naive at best, as when you're own testers encountered behavior they didn't expect, you noted that they immediately reported it as a bug.

It seems your goals can be easily met by simply documenting CLEARLY that pressing multiple prefix keys is additive and will lead to errors (or at least unexpected results) if not corrected.

Asking for a change which you hypothesize 'should not bother' the >99% that use Free42 to make an incorrect key sequence more recoverable for the <1% that may use it is simply not reasonable.

You can of course pay (or whatever) someone with sufficient skills to fork Free42 to make you a private build with this change to be used by you and your associates, but that would be frozen in time and could not benefit from the ongoing bug fixes and enhancements Thomas publishes regularly unless you pay them again, etc. Seems to make more sense to adopt the standard Free42 code and publish/explain the small limitation to your users.

Please don't take this as criticism, it is intended as feedback and guidance for how this community operates and what they expect. I hope you can resolve it and proceed to release as it looks like an interesting skin approach and I'm curious to see how widely it would be adopted.