Re: Do shorthands break basic tooling (tags, grep, etc)? (was Re: Shorthands have landed on master)

[Phil Sainty]

On 2021-10-02 19:45, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> There's a huge difference between breaking literal searches for
> symbols by text-searching tools, and breaking basic Emacs commands
> because the name the user sees and types is not known to Emacs.

But shorthands does *both* of those things.

The name the user sees is "s-foo".

The name known to Emacs is "string-library-foo" (or whatever).

The user types "C-h o s-foo RET" and Emacs says "no match".


The huge difference is that with shorthands the above problem happens
to every user, whether or not they're aware that symbols can have
shorthands; whereas with the "nameless" approach it happens only to
the users who have knowingly chosen to have it happen, as a willing
trade-off to achieve something else.

I'm genuinely confused that you're disapproving of a feature that
people must opt into, on the basis of a problem which already happens
with the approved feature that people can't opt out of.

(Bearing in mind that the raison d'être for my idea was specifically
to provide an *alternative to shorthands* for people who wished to opt
into reading and writing short names, regardless of the 'problems',
and to allow them to do so without affecting anyone other than
themselves.)


-Phil