Re: Enabling Transient Mark Mode by default

[Mike Mattie <codermattie@gmail.com>]

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On Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:12:35 +0000
Bastien <bzg@altern.org> wrote:

> Sascha Wilde <wilde@sha-bang.de> writes:
> 
> >> My point is that there are really two ways of having the active
> >> region highlighted by default: either by setting
> >> transient-mark-mode to t, or by letting C-SPC turn Transient Mark
> >> mode temporarily on.
> >
> > The difference is that in the case of setting transient-mark-mode
> > to t I can still put (transient-mark-mode -1) in my .emacs file to
> > get back the old behavior.  In case of the later "solution" there
> > would be no way to get back the original behavior -- or am I
> > mistaken?
> 
> Since C-@ would be bound to the old C-SPC behavior (only set mark) you
> would be able to set C-SPC back to this old behavior.
> 
> Or you would have a variable deciding whether C-SPC should trigger
> Transient Mark mode temporarily.  
> 

After following a bit of this thread I decided to challenge my assumptions
and strain my brain to come up with scenarios where highlighting is
truly useful.

I was able to dig up several. Ediff is I think the best example. The highlighting
shows precisely what changed, with a higher granularity than a plain context diff.
Simply put I am more effective at finding what I need with the highlighting since
it points me straight to my task, which is analyzing the difference in two buffers.

Another scenario is where I am not sure of my bounds. A good example is active-paren
which I use. When I am not sure of my brace matching placing my cursor on a paren
shows me the scope as long as it's within the viewport.

However when I am trying to delineate a span of text within a buffer a highlight does not
help me at all, because all it does is highlight the middle. My goal in creating a span
is to find the bounds, the middle is obviously implied!

You can try it yourself. Try to mark a region while looking at the highlighted part only.
Your stuck, because it's highlighting were you have been, not where you need to go.
To take paraphrase from Lewis Carrol, it's riding the horse backwards to see where you
have been.

I do see one way that it could be useful though. Often with active-paren when the opening
or closing brace is outside the viewport it degrades to showing the bounded line in the
minibuffer. With any luck this code fragment might pop up the image of where the bound
is in my head.

A useful highlighting would pop up/down some window ala icicles that automatically shrunk
to the required size, and highlighted up to the mark/boundary that was normally outside of
the viewport.

it would be good for active paren, and those cases where you do actually forget where you
dropped a mark. It would have to be on-demand as emacs would go nuts visually during simple
scrolling, but does that at least sounds useful and novel ?

Out of this enormous thread is it possible to invent a highlighting feature that shows me
*what I am looking for*, not what I already found ?

Or maybe rephrased can highlighting tell me what I don't already know ?

Cheers,
Mike Mattie

P.S: forgot isearch. useful highlighting there.

P.P.S: what about changing the arrow keys to move like M-f,M-b ? If I set a mark I probably
want to scoot around for navigation or creating a region. That would be useful.

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