Re: not good proposal: "C-z <letter>" reserved for users

[Jean Louis]

* Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> [2021-02-09 12:13]:
> 
> > 
> > Emacs is used on console by millions of people. Console itself defines
> > C-z as suspend of the job, so C-z is always expecte to suspend the job
> > for many programs, not only Emacs.
> > 
> > [...]
> > 
> > Those are common job control commands:
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_control_%28Unix%29#Commands
> > 
> 
> As you see on that page, C-c also has a standard meaning, which Emacs
> doesn't follow.  Besides, the proposal binds "C-z C-z" to "frame-suspend".

The proposal is good for Emacs but not good for shell users. Shell is
fundamental to Emacs, it is foundation. Shell users expect C-z to work
so that other jobs can be run in the shell. Breaking Emacs job is easy
by quitting emacs, that has less priority and I do not assume that
each job control feature has to be implemented in Emacs.

Personal usage pattern is such that often I interrupt jobs in shell
and run them again upon the need. The expectation on how to suspend
the job comes from shell, it does not come from Emacs.

Hard to explain.

Imagine if every shell program would have different job control keys,
that would be hell to remember.

I can suspend vim, I can suspend mg (Emacs replacement), I can suspend
zile, nvi, and mc (Midnight Commander), and I do not know which other
terminal run program I cannot suspend with C-z -- but then for Emacs
proposal says to depart from long year expected feature of the shell
and to break the feauture and to introduce some other key.

That would not be nice. I guess that is introduced by people who do
not use job control in shell, for them personally it does not matter,
but think of millions of Emacs users, they may expect it.

I don't think such things that are fundamental or features that have
been implemented for years should be questioned. Anyway I will agree
to whatever developers wish and want.

Some people have good computer, not everybody has. I have Lenovo T410
that I use to process videos and commands are run through Emacs
Lisp. I may invoke the command and heat computer so much that if I
invoke other program it goes into shutdown. I guess it is some feature
of overheating. I may need to suspend Emacs not to do anything, so
that I can run some other program in background. Video processing may
take sometimes days. I do not think that many users process videos by
using Emacs Lisp, but that is how I do it. If process is interrupted
than I have to manually find the interrupted file, that is not easy
but I did some measures on how to find it easier. I may invoke video
processing in multiple directories though I try to avoid that. And
Emacs Lisp command is doing it one by one, not in parallel as not to
give much burden to CPU and again invoke overheating. Thus suspending
does make sense for me.

Jean