Re: Suggested experimental test

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   > What about C-o -- that seems to be hitting the trash can, for whatever 
   > reason.  Some of these bindings (C-o for example) have existed for 40 
   > years in Emacs (M-o M-s was once upon a time on M-s).
   >
   > There was alot of thought put into it back then, and the intent was to 
   > make it easy to write code and text.  That was the main intent of Emacs, 
   > and main design decisions in the bindings.  These "freeing up 
   > keybindings" initiatives make it harder for people to use Emacs, not 
   > easier.

   C-o is not at all "hitting the trash can", at the moment there is nothing 
   more than a proposal to conduct an experiment to make a (small?) change to 
   its meaning.

It isn't a small change to remove a feature completely.  When asked to
keep _a_ binding, it has been meet with silence and it has been more
important to inconvinence users than to listen to them, so I can only
assume that this will a similar case for C-o.  The overal tone of the
discussion of removing keybindings has been to remove them without
considering users, and that it is more important to free them up at
all costs.

   C-o is, by the way, not even mentioned in the tutorial.

Not everything is mentioned in the tutorial, nor can it.

   Emacs evolves very conservatively, and if at some point it becomes clear 
   that some key binding is not useful for 99.9% of its users, there is no 
   reason to keep it as is just because 40 years ago, under very different 
   circumstances, it was considered convenient or useful.

emacs-devel is not even 1% of people using Emacs, and the more I see
these statements the more I am inclined to think that people on this
list don't use Emacs.  When it has been suggested to actually do a
poll, it is far to cumbersome, and instead complicated schemes are
devised.