Re: position on changing defaults?

[Kim F. Storm]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>>> should be allowed to have 0-width).  
>> Why?
>
> Because that's how the region behaves and that's how Emacs rectangles
> behave, so it's more consistent.

Well, I've never had a use for them in practice - and one of the
features of CUA rectangles is that the cursor is INSIDE one of the
rectangle corners -- namely the corner which you expand by moving the
cursor.  

Visually, this is much more pleasing than having the cursor
sometimes inside, sometimes outside the rectangle.

Also, with CUA-rectangles, the cursor can be at any of the four
corners of the rectangle.  So having zero size rectangle breaks
this - which is the main reason I didn't insist on having them.

Finally, CUA-rectangles are not limited by arbitrary line endings;
you can expand a rectangle beyond the end of the current line.
For example, with standard rectangles, how can you mark the
text marked with X'es in the following sample:

     ...............
     ........XXXXX....
     ........XXX
     ........XXXXX..
     ........X
     ............

?

With CUA rectangles, you simply place the cursor at the
top-left X, and hit C-RET, down x 4, right x 4.   Try it!

So *I* don't want rectangles to work just like the region - I want the
rectangles to work better than that - also in the presense of tabs in
the middle of lines!

>>> Also I'm not convinced by the special M-foo bindings 
>> Some or all of them?
>
> All of them.
>
>> What's the alternative?
>
> What do you mean?  I've never used any of them, yet managed to edit my
> texts just fine ;-)
>
> Basically, I want rectangle regions to behave pretty much *exactly* like
> normal regions (the only difference is that it sets a var
> `region-is-rectangle' and for that reason it is displayed differently)
> and then some commands (like C-w ...) behave differently depending on
> whether the region was rectangle or not, and other commands only work
> with one of the two kinds of regions.

I'm _definitely_ in favor of modifying basic commands to behave
correctly/sensibly if "rectangle-active-p".

BTW, shouldn't a command like upcase-region be merged into upcase-word
so that marking the region (transient-mark-mode active) so that M-u will
upcase the region instead of the word following the region...

>> The self-insert-char feature inserts OUTSIDE the rectangle, so
>> I don' see how it compares to C-x r t?
>
> If the rectangle has 0-width, C-x r t also inserts "outside".

Ok, but you don't an iota of visible clue as to where the rectangle is.

And transient-mark-mode is damn ugly as an indicator for standard 
rectangles.

>
>> E.g. to put ( ) around all lines of a rectangle, just mark
>> the rectangle (top-down), and enter ) RET ( .  Can you do that
>> faster with C-x r t ?
>
> No.  But then, I never put (...) around all lines of a rectangle.

I don't do that often either, but take it as an illustration of the
principle of inserting on the "active" side of the rectangle.
And moving the active corner with RET.

>> BTW, M-s is equivalent to C-x r t (I believe).
>
> Except that it applies to one more column, so it can't be used as a form
> of insert-rectangle, contrary to C-x r t.
> ... but restricting it to self-insert-char is problematic.

Just use M-o M-s for that ...  It's still shorter than C-x r t :-)

-- 
Kim F. Storm <address@hidden> http://www.cua.dk