On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 9:44 PM Richard Stallman <
rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> You can look at your own usage after C-x o (even more telling for people
> who aren't using the mouse or mostly dedicated frames) with view-lossage or
> via dribble file, but for me, the answer is "because the cursor is hardly
> ever in the right spot", even though I do use save-place. I would hazard a
> guess that wanting to immediately insert a period or comma is roughly the
> same order of commonality as wanting to insert an 'o' (or 'O').
That seems plausible to me, and that supports my point: each
self-inserting key that we give a special meaning to after C-x o is
one additional nuisance.
MY own read on it, which continues to be true as my dribble file grows, is that I almost never want self-inserting keys after C-x o; I'm doing cursor movement or window manipulation (including isearch and recenter) the _vast_ majority of the time.
I guess that some people want to quickly check something in another buffer before switching back and inserting characters where they left, which gives it a potential of up to half of the time, but from what I can tell, more people these days are doing that sort of pop-out/pop-back via methods that create and then close the outside reference (via tool categories like grep, xref, and eldoc), and most people used to newer tools instead use a completion framework or LSP.
All in all, something like Juri's prototype where users can opt commands into using a standardized (and thus learnable) repeatable framework would be an improvement for the vast majority of users who became aware of it, in large part because it's easily opt-in at a granular level. (For example, easily enabled for changing window sizes without impacting C-x o.)
~Chad