Re: position on changing defaults?

[Stefan Monnier]

> It would be interesting to know the new maintainers opinion on changing
> some of the current default settings.

I don't necessarily have the same preferences as Richard, so there might
be some defaults which I may be willing to consider changing, but I tend
to agree with David that many of the features provided in Emacs are not
turned on by default mostly because they're not polished enough.

> - transient-mark,

I'd like to make transient-mark-mode enabled by default, although the
details of how to do it aren't clear yet.  The way I see it happen:
provide a new setting of transient-mark-mode which makes all mark-*
commands enable temporary-transient-mark-mode.  In most cases, the only
difference between this and plain old transient-mark-mode will be the
need to use C-SPC C-SPC rather than C-SPC, and C-u C-x C-x rather than
C-x C-x.

>   selection with Shift-arrow keys

Not sure about this one.  I've been using cua-selection-mode (well,
enabling rather than using, really) for a little while now and
I basically don't notice it, so it looks like it might be worth
enabling.  But I think for it to be enabled by default, we may want to
integrate it more tightly so that it doesn't need post-command-hook,
for example.

> - show-paren-mode on by default

Never liked it.  Is it really that popular?

> - iswitchb-mode on by default

I'd rather improve the general completion mechanism, than only improve
it for buffer selection.

> - bind ibuffer to C-x C-b

See other email.

> - hide-ifdef-mode on by default for C/C++/objc

What does it provide by default (other than hiding #if 0...#endif)?
Last I checked I got the impression that this package requires
configuration to be useful, so enabling it by default doesn't help much.
Did I miss something?

> - flyspell-mode on by default for text-mode

I indeed have it on in text-mode (and programming modes as well, as
a matter of fact), but I haven't given any thought to enabling it
by default.  I think it might be a bit too brittle currently to be
enabled by default: it usually works just fine, but I've had problems
with it every once in a while.


        Stefan