Re: Shift-movement selection

[Kim F. Storm]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>       So it would need to be implemented by some special
>     > feature that checks for shift.  But I think that is an unclean way to
>     > do things.  
>     >             
>
>     I strongly disagree that doing things consistently for the user is
>     unclean.  
>
> It is unclean in Emacs to hard-wire the meaning of the shift key.

With CUA mode, I explicitly mark the movement commands (with a CUA property)
to which the shift key should take effect - so there is no hard-wiring
of the shift key.  If you explicitly bind S-<something> to a command which
does not have this property, it will not do the "shift thing"...


>
>     That is what CUA mode does now - and it works _very_ well.
>     E.g. to mark a word, line, or sexp, just do S-M-f, S-C-n, or S-C-M-f.
>
>     Why force people to use the arrow-keys etc. when we have the
>     perfect emacs bindings already.
>
> What bothers me is not that S-C-f would enable the mark, but that C-f
> would disable it.  That is an incompatibility in something important.

With CUA, C-f ONLY disables it if the region was started with S-C-f.
That works very well in practice.

Maybe you could try using CUA-mode (briefly) to try how it feels.

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