Re: delete-selection-mode as default

[Clément Pit-Claudel]

On 2018-09-07 10:39, hw wrote:
>> On 2018-09-07 05:18, hw wrote:
>>> When a selection is active, why would anyone assume that typing
>>> an arbitrary letter is supposed to replace the entire selection,
>>> or to disable it?

>> Out of experience, mostly.  When almost every other program you
>> use besides Emacs behaves that way, it's easy to assume that Emacs
>> will behave the same way.

> It's not my experience because when I want a selection deleted, I
> delete it.  If it gets deleted otherwise, that's a mistake or maybe
> even a bug when no undo is available.

You seem to be conflating experience and desirable behavior.

> I call it a design flaw because if whoever made it this way had
> given any thought to it, it would at least be customizable

Fortunately, some of those who "made it that way" did think about it :)  For 
example, Microsoft Word has an option called "Typing Replaces Selected Text."  
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a similar setting in OpenOffice, nor in 
LibreOffice.
Gtk entries and textviews do not seem to provide a similar setting, either, but 
I wouldn't assume that they didn't give any thought to it.

> Software supporting users in making mistakes and making the mistakes
> even worse suffers from design flaws unless doing so is the very
> purpose of the software.

I'm having trouble following the reasoning.  

> I suspect that one important reason for the dangerous and careless
> dealing with selections you find in many other programs is that the
> developers couldn't be bothered to find a better way.

I understand that feeling, but I don't see much to support it.  From the same 
observations, you could just as well conclude that no one cared enough about 
the behavior offered by Emacs to send patches to OpenOffice, Gtk, or many of 
the other libre IDEs and text editors.