Re: Suggestion: Mapping of M-g should be goto-line

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Thu, 25 Mar 2004 13:30:18 +0100
Danilo Segan <address@hidden> wrote:

> Sorry if I sounded too harsh

Not at all. My criticism, if any, is directed to the idea that
"educating" is always the best answer. People often don't want to be
educated, and the reasons (lack of time, interest, whatever) are as
subjective as perfectly legitimate.

> -- I just want the defaults to be good,
> and I'm not at all claiming to know what they should be.  I'm
> bringing issues and/or solutions to issues brought up in discussion,
> which are more "Emacs-ey" than simply using goto-line by hand.

I, in fact, agree with you. We differ in that I think goto-line is a
perfectly reasonable thing to do in many situations, and its relation
with compiling, etc. is only marginal.

> With that aside, your claim seems to be spurious at best: you've got
> friends who "just won't spend the time to learn features they feel
> they're not going to need" -- if they're not going to need them, why
> would they care if goto-line is easily accessible, or not?

I was referring to things like compile.el; in a few cases, they chose
the same path I do (not because of my influence, just because they
didn't want to spend time reading the manuals): compile in another
console window, use Emacs to edit, fix, save, and back to the console
to compile again. Certainly they do use goto-line; in fact, binding it
to a key was one of the first things they asked me to do (the other one
is setup an f-key to do bs-cycle-next, they won't touch switch-to-buffer
and list-buffers with a ten feet pole).

> But two of us, _who_ do know of alternate [...]
> are far from a good statistical sample (and even
> our views differ).

Sure.

> Lets not knowingly hide very
> useful features such as next-error, and expose goto-line instead.

The falacy here is that you consider next-error much more useful than
goto-line. I don't. I'd bet for users in general, many of which will
never compile a thing, going to a line is orders of magnitude more usual
than searching for an error.

I have a friend (a bookstore owner) who manages all client orders through
an ASCII/Perl/MultiEdit setup (MultiEdit is a programmers' editor). He
doesn't program at all; he writes orders in ascii files, process them
with Perl scripts, send the resulting request to his suppliers, and on
arrival of the goodies, he manually edits the ascii files to remove
items and classifies the items in boxes for his clients. He won't know
what next-error does, but he uses (the MultiEdit equivalent of) goto-line
many times a day. As you've said earlier, you and I and most people
around here are not statistically normal Emacs users (I think).

> (If you want a shortcut to make some sense, it's easy: "error" in
> Serbian is "greška" [so M-g], and you can easily remember it, right? ;)

Not a good mnemonic, "gresca" in Spanish means something totally
different, I'm afraid ;)

> since I'd like to point out that many others who
> reach for goto-line probably don't)

Or, perhaps, it's just that there are not alternatives for a simple
task: going to a line. Not an error line, not a line containing some
text, just to the line numbered X. 

> you know how to set it
> up to suit your preferences, and have probably developed your own set
> of preferences over time, which differ from defaults. 

Sure.

                                                                Juanma