Re: delete-selection-mode as default (WAS: Some developement questions)

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Eli.

On Fri, Sep 07, 2018 at 09:47:52 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Feel free to start a user poll, though: if it turns out I'm the only
> one who thinks delete-selection-mode is inappropriate in programming
> modes, we can make it the default; I can easily turn it off in my
> configuration.  Though I would urge people to actually try this in
> programming modes before responding, and in any case the poll should
> request to provide the major modes used with the responses.

No, you're not the only disliker of d-s-mode.  I utterly detest it, to
the point that Emacs's lack of this feature was one of the things which
attracted me to Emacs in the first place.  At last, an editing program
with a rational, well thought out interface!  A thing I hated about these
other programs was that I could have spent a long time building up a
(highlighted) region in them, only to lose it irretrievably on carelessly
typing an arrow key without <shift>.  As a result of things like that, I
was never able to relax whilst using these programs - I had to remain
hyper-alert to avoid the above sort of lossage.

I appreciate that Emacs's d-s-mode doesn't suffer all these drawbacks,
but it does suffer some of them.

I believe delete-selection-mode is objectively bad; deleting/killing
potentially large areas of text should not occur as a side effect of
something whose main action is smalll (like inserting a single
character).  As well as being bad UI, it violates the "do one thing and
do it well" principle.

In the current polling exercise, I would urge those interpreting the
responses to take account not merely of the numbers of
supporters/detractors but the strength of feeling behind those responses.
I've seen several such that strongly dislike d-s-mode, but haven't seen
any saying "I utterly detest editors lacking delete-selection-mode".
That suggests to me that we should not enable this mode by default.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).