bug#12723: 24.2; Improvement: changing text rectangle kill/past and its integration with the kill-ring

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> the highlighting would do the same since the highlighting is there
>> to make visible what the rectangle operations would/will do.
> IMHO, this doesn't make sense.  The result will be complete confusion
> of the user wrt what parts of text are being selected.  You should try
> that if you don't believe me.

I'm sure it can be confusing.  Yet, it reflects "which part of the text
is selected", just as much as the current region highlighting does, with
the same amount of confusion (except that we'd have several such
regions, and an expectation that the combination should look rectangular).

I'm really not worried, tho: in those cases where it's really confusing,
people probably don't use rectangle operations anyway (after all, if the
highlighting is confusing yet reflects what's going to happen, it must
be pretty difficult for the user to figure out in her head (i.e. without
the highlighting help) what's going to happen).

> So we have visual-line-mode on by default, but rectangle regions will
> disregard that completely and treat continued lines as one line?  Why
> does this make sense?

Don't know.  But that's what we have now and have had for eons.  Really,
this issue is a complete non-issue: we're talking about reflecting on
screen what is about to happen, so any problem "on screen" (i.e. in the
highlighting) is really due to what's actually going to happen, not to
the highlighting per se.  As soon as you write the code to "fix"
kill-rectangle, I'm pretty sure updating the highlighting
correspondingly will be easy.


        Stefan