Re: RFC: enable ^Z by default?

[André Kugland]

Hello,

I don’t know if I’m allowed to give my opinion here, but I think that the

inexperienced user argument doesn’t hold in light of the fact that Ubuntu,

which is the distro most inexperienced users use, has suspension enabled

by default without complaints.

André Kugland

On Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 5:11 AM Benno Schulenberg <bensberg@telfort.nl> wrote:

Hi all,

When typing ^T^Z, nano says: "Suspension is not enabled" (in the default setup).
I think this is silly -- if '^Z Suspend' is listed in the Execute menu, then it
should work.  However, to have ^T^Z work and have a plain ^Z say "Suspension is
not enabled"... that doesn't make sense.  So the question becomes: should we
enable ^Z by default?

In the archives of the mailing list I cannot find any reasoning for disabling
the ^Z keystroke by default and requiring an option (-z) or a toggle (M-Z) to
enable it.  I can imagine two reasons: 1) the inexperienced user might think
that ^Z is Undo, and to prevent these users from being "thrown out" of nano...
2) users might sometimes hit ^Z when they mean to type ^X, and since both
keystrokes kind of stop nano, to prevent any confusion...

But in editors like vim, emacs, lpe and ne, ^Z simply works, no enabling is
required, so why not in nano?  And if the effect of the ^Z keystroke bothers
the user, they can (since version 2.1.0 from 2008) unbind the key in their
nanorc.  And since version 5.0 they can then still suspend nano with ^T^Z,
no need for a re-enabling keystroke.

Furthermore, Debian and Ubuntu have had 'set suspend' in their /etc/nanorc
for years, so a considerable portion of Linux users have had ^Z enabled by
default for a long time, and no one seems to have complained.

Therefore, I propose to enable ^Z by default, to make -z, --suspendable,
and 'set suspendable' no-ops (recognized but ignored), and to remove the
M-Z toggle and its bindable function.  See attached patch.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Opinions?

Benno