Re: [Nano-devel] dropping an anchor at a place where wants to return

[David Ramsey]

Benno Schulenberg:
> Okay.  So there is some interest in this feature.  But... how exactly
> should this work?  And maybe you (David, Victor, ...) find the
> mechanism proposed by Marco better?

I'd actually prefer Marco's mechanism.  I'd usually make use of only one
anchor, but there are times where there are two or three places I need
to jump to, and his way allows for more than one.

For example, if I have to deal with several instances of a global's
being used in one source file, I currently have to do a bunch of extra
searching and finagling if I want to jump between that many places, and
having a few anchors would make it much easier.  (I had to do this a few
times when I was refactoring justify to make it undoable, and this would
have saved me some significant time.)

> For the anchoring, I can imagine three forms of functioning:

<snip>

> 3) M-" always sets the anchor; M-' jumps to it.  Clearing the anchor
> is not needed.

Of your three forms, this makes the most sense to me.  Although Marco's
way of having one key to toggle an anchor, and two other keys to jump
forward and backward between anchors makes even more sense, given that
it fits with moving forward and backward between multiple buffers,
searching forward and backward, etc.

> But this eats up two keystrokes.

If they're needed for proper navigation, that's not so much of an issue
(and this also applies to the hypothetical three in Marco's version).

> And somehow I find typing Shift+Alt+key quite awkward.

Agreed.  But Esc followed by Shift-' for " should work just as well,
shouldn't it?  Having the option of Esc before such sequences makes it
somewhat easier for me, since having to hold down several keys for an
extended period can sometimes be rather wearying for me.