Re: Enabling Transient Mark Mode by default

["Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

Puh! This was a long thread with lots of details. After reading it all I 
think I agree with Juri, there are good reasons to turn on 
cua-selection-mode by default. It looks like Kim already have been 
travelling the road we are on now.

It looks to me like cua-selection-mode/cua-mode does not disturb the use 
of the mark ring. Or does it? I do not use the mark ring myself. (Sasha? 
Stefan?)

I have cut and paste some arguments here for convenience and added some 
comments:

Juri Linkov wrote:
> Deactivating the region without the bell is possible with
> keyboard-escape-quit.
> 
> But even this is not necessary: cua-selection-mode uses C-SPC C-SPC
> to set the mark without activating the region (more precisely the second
> C-SPC cancels the region activation).  This is another reason to enable
> cua-selection-mode by default because this will help people who use
> the mark for navigational purposes.

Juri Linkov wrote:
 > In cua-selection-mode point movement deactivates the region only when
 > the region was activated by shift-arrows.  But when the region is
 > activated by C-SPC, point movements extend the active region.

I think this could be made a little bit more useful without sacrificing 
consistency.

cua-mode/cua-selection-mode activates the region with shift added to 
some commands: arrows/home/end /C-arrows/C-home/C-end and deactivates 
them if they are used without shift. This is how other applications 
tends to do it too. So this is good in my opinion.

However when it comes to other movement commands I think they should 
extend the region since that is useful. If you want to deactivate the 
region that is easy enough (C-g, the commands above).


David De La Harpe Golden wrote:
 > On 21/02/2008, David De La Harpe Golden
 >>  Given apparent concern over mouse then keyboard interaction, maybe
 >>  pc-selection-mode needs to also deactivate the mark when cursor moves
 >>  after the _mouse_ has set the region...
 >
 > er... which cua-selection-mode already does...


Richard Stallman wrote:
 >     I am still trying to grasp the problem. Apart from the region to act
 >     with CUA keys like in all main applications I use today I would 
expect
 >
 >     * operations on the region should only happen when the region is 
visible
 >
 > I do not understand clearly what you mean.
 >
 > Are you proposing a change?  If so, what _concretely_ is that change?

Yes. A bit more consistency. I think for all commands for which it is 
useful to work for the region only they should do so when the region is 
highlighted, otherwise not.

However I should add that some users seem to want to have the region 
active but not highlighted. That should be an option that they should 
turn on if they want it.


Stefan Monnier wrote:
 >> Don't we all think that new users probably want the highlight the way
 >> cua-mode does it?
 >
 > Actually, in this respect, cua-mode isn't very different, as far as
 > I can tell: you also get into those situations where the region is
 > highlighted when you don't want it and you have to hit C-g to get rid
 > of it.