Hi Carsten,
Hmmm, why would you ever want to call thee commands with
a prefix argument? That did not occur to me, which is why these
commands do not care about it.
Do you mean "what does it do"? It goes down by that many lines first.
Do you mean "what's the practical value"? I'm right-handed, so I
frequently move my right hand over to the mouse to test my program,
but my left hand always stays on the keyboard (what else would it
do?). On my keyboard layout, I can hit all of C-u, C-a, C-e, C-p,
C-k, and C-y with my left hand, so I can a whole lot of simple
navigation editing without putting down the mouse (or mousing back
over to my emacs window). If C-a and C-e can't use numeric prefixes,
I need twice as many hands to move the cursor down. :-)
More generally, I have many years of experience with the emacs
keybindings. A mode should have a really good reason to change the
built-ins. (Steve Yegge's js2-mode also screws up some of these, but
has what are essentially unbreak-my-keybindings variables to let you
work around them.) It looks like this is not a case of it being
intentional, but merely that nobody has gotten around to it yet.
That's fine, but I'm simply reporting that some of us would like this
fixed. :-)
- Ken