Re: 'M-o' ('facemap-keymap') has now been removed until March 10th 2021

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> The test period is now over, so we should now discuss whether to make
> the change permanent, and if so, whether we should bind any of the
> affected commands to something else.

We've now had a one week discussion period, so I've made some decisions.

1) Nobody wanted to keep the global `M-o' binding (facemenu), so I've
removed that.

2) There was no clamouring to keep a global binding for `center-line'
and `center-paragraph', so those that find those commands extremely
useful will have to bind it themselves.

3) 99.7% of the discussion involved whether `font-lock-fontify-block'
was useful or not.  Apparently most people had never heard of it, but
when they did hear of it, several said (I'm paraphrasing) "that sounds
quite useful indeed, but it's a bit odd" (i.e., the "block" it fontifies
doesn't seem ideal).  Gregory suggested a variation on it, and that
seems to work even better, so I've included it and bound it to
`C-x x f'.  (But those that really want `font-lock-fontify-block' will
have to bind it themselves.)

I've now pushed these changes.  (And we no longer need to preload
facemenu, I guess, so I'll try to remove that, but it's not totally
trivial.)

This concludes our first experimental test on the devel branch.  The
amount of feedback wasn't overwhelming, but we did get some -- and I
guess the `M-o' command wasn't very popular, so I'm not really that
surprised.

So I think it was a moderately successful experiment, and we should use
this way of trying out user interface changes more.  The time periods
seem OK to me -- one month for the experiment, and then one additional
week for discussion at the end (so I guess it's really more like five
weeks).

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no