Re: C-d deleting region considered harmful

[Wojciech Meyer]

Chad Brown <address@hidden> writes:

> Question for the people who dislike transient-mark-mode and it's
> related behaviors:
>
> Do you find yourself making an unwanted `highlighted region' using any
> other method than C-xC-x?  The potential candidates that come to mind
> are `C-space and movement', shift-selection, and mouse-sweep.
>
> I used to dislike transient-mark-mode (back when it was called
> zmacs-region and I was using Epoch), and disabled it along with most
> of the `chrome', but at one point I intentionally tried working with
> all of the bells and whistles and found it helpful except when I was
> using C-xC-x often when editing code.  I spend more time editing text
> these days, and much less hoping around with C-xC-x, so I just live
> with the occasional distraction, but perhaps a way to invert the ARG
> of exchange-point-and-mark would let more emacs hackers enjoy the
> benefits of t-m-m without being annoyed by the spurious flashing/C-g.

I find `transient-mark-mode' quite useful, some of the commands work in
a different way, maybe more intuitively (for instance `comment-dwim' or
some of the replace functions).

However I've been annoyed quite few times when it highlights the region
when I don't want it. C-x C-x being a primal example (yes, I understand
that it's a change in semantics).

So I think overall it is a good improvement for handling regions in
Emacs.

However, I would not like to see C-d killing region, as in my work flow
I quite often used it with selected region (most importantly it is
better to separate C-d and backspace). Also people who are aware of C-d
most likely are people who used Emacs for some time, in a contrast to
the users who just hit backspace. So the behaviour of having a choice,
`kill or not to kill' the region with a pressure on a intuitive default
behaviour for both groups of users seems to reasonable.

>
> *Chad

Cheers;
Wojciech