Re: Lines again

[Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy@cs.bham.ac.uk>]

Stefan Monnier writes:

> I think "screen lines" and "visual lines" should be the same, yes.
> "continuation lines" refer specifically to screen lines that are
> created because of wrapping (i.e. are not displayed on the same
> visual line as the beginning of the logical line).

I am thinking differently.  Not just the choice of the terms, but the
way things have been laid out in the manual seems to suggest that
there are two different things going on.  Some of the problems seem to
be because the different ideas have been fused based on some
extraneous implementation considerations.

The two ideas are visual line mode (section 18.8) and logical line
mode (which is the opposite of visual line mode, discussed in section
7.8).

The visual line mode user is just dealing with blobs of contiguous
text.  The text is presented in lines, which are "real" and used for
editing.  If you want to call these blobs of text "logical lines", be
my guest, but they don't really think of these things as lines.
"Visual lines" exist in this world.

The logical line mode user is dealing with real logical lines.  The
screen lines in terms of which the logical lines are presented are a
necessity of life, but they are not the real focus.  (Imagine looking
at a byte-code logical line in the debug mode, split across 20
different screen lines.  When do you ever want to navigate through
those screen lines?)

Once you set up this mental model of visual line mode and logical line
mode, it stands to reason that *all* the movement operations in the
visual line mode should be by visual lines, and *all* the movement
operations in the logical line mode should be by logical lines.  The
`line-move-visual' option is an interloper which has no reason to
exist.

So, I am proposing that you get rid of the `line-move-visual' as a
user option and revert C-n and C-p to act in the logical/visual manner
in their appropriate modes.  You will make a lot of long-time Emacs
users a lot happier.

Cheers,
Uday

PS. The comp.emacs thread that prompted this observation:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/browse_thread/thread/43549e055d64908b#