bug#45536: [PATCH] Pretty-print keys without <> around modifiers

["Mattias Engdegård" <mattiase@acm.org>]

30 dec. 2020 kl. 04.54 skrev Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>:

> On the third hand, we could try this out on master for a while and see
> whether anything breaks -- my guess would be that nothing will break.
> 
> On the fourth hand, I can see people asking "what's the difference
> between C-<return> and <C-return>?" on Reddit for decades to come, so it
> might just confuse people and waste their time.  So...  I'm leaning
> towards not changing this.
> 
> I'm running out of hands here.

Let me give you a hand then! The latest patch puts the change under control of a variable, defaulting to off. This should take care of your concerns for compatibility problems, as well as the possibility of confusion (which I think is minuscule).

The variable can be set permanently by users who prefer the new key binding style. It can also be bound temporarily for specific uses. It was a specific use I had in mind, but there is no reason to withhold an improvement from users in general.

Thanks for your careful reasoning. We can all agree that if we included pleasing everybody on Reddit in our design criteria, no progress would ever be made.