Re: delete-selection-mode as default

[hw]

Drew Adams <address@hidden> writes:

> [...]
> Hw (and others): The behavior that Alan is describing - the one
> he chooses for Emacs, is the original Emacs region behavior.
> It is not some crazy, odd, or dangerous thing.

I know it's intended to be the way.  Yet having a hidden region all the
time always made me feel uneasy because it *is* dangerous to have a part
of the buffer --- the extent of which is not really known and changes
with every movement of point --- being always subject to commands that
may delete it or do whatever with it when I happen to make a mistake.
And I might not even realize having made the mistake because it all
happens hidden.

I remember when I learned about it, I immediately decided it's a very
bad and dangerous thing to have and did my best to avoid it.  So over
the decades, I've become good at ignoring this stupid region thing and
at not making mistakes that accidentally modify regions.

That doesn't mean lurking hidden regions waiting for my mistakes are
good, and it doesn't matter if that was the intended way.  Not all of
Emacs` ways are perfect, and this is a way I'd really like to see
finally change.

> It's a perfectly fine, efficient, and logical behavior.

not to me

And with evolutions like t-m-m and d-s-m it seems to have become more
inconsistent, confusing and way too complicated.

> [...]
> I'd prefer that we turn
> on `delete-selection-mode' by default, but it's apparently
> already been decided (by RMS and Eli) that that won't
> happen just yet. Not a big deal.

Maybe it can happen once this mess has been cleaned up.

> We might want to consider making more obvious some of
> the main user choices regarding region, selection etc. I think
> it's not obvious to users, especially new users, what choices
> are available. I don't have a concrete suggestion of how we
> might do that, but I think there's probably room for
> improvement.
>
> The various variables, modes, etc. that control the behavior
> are here and there, and their presentation in the docs is also
> here and there. Depending on the choices you want, the
> notion and behavior of the region can have to do with
> cutting and pasting, navigation, acting on a stretch of text,
> narrowing, highlighting, mouse selection, and other things.
> [...]

right

an article and a tutorial