From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: David De La Harpe Golden Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: shouldn't `delete-blank-lines' treat form-feed as whitespace? Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:35:49 +0000 Message-ID: <4B8ED635.7010102@harpegolden.net> References: <4CB6D99021EF440EAB10FFDB2740FE8B@us.oracle.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1267652170 10221 80.91.229.12 (3 Mar 2010 21:36:10 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 21:36:10 +0000 (UTC) Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Drew Adams Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Wed Mar 03 22:36:05 2010 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1NmwEe-0007WS-L0 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:36:04 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:60577 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1NmwEe-0000ZD-0D for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:36:04 -0500 Original-Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1NmwEX-0000Z4-Up for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:35:57 -0500 Original-Received: from [140.186.70.92] (port=36798 helo=eggs.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1NmwEV-0000Yn-Vu for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:35:56 -0500 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1NmwEU-0007ff-Ui for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:35:55 -0500 Original-Received: from harpegolden.net ([65.99.215.13]:33086) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1NmwEU-0007fa-Kb for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:35:54 -0500 Original-Received: from [87.198.54.192] (87-198-54-192.ptr.magnet.ie [87.198.54.192]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (Client CN "David De La Harpe Golden", Issuer "David De La Harpe Golden Personal CA rev 3" (verified OK)) by harpegolden.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1F5188F26; Wed, 3 Mar 2010 21:35:51 +0000 (GMT) User-Agent: Mozilla-Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 (X11/20091109) In-Reply-To: <4CB6D99021EF440EAB10FFDB2740FE8B@us.oracle.com> X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: Genre and OS details not recognized. X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:121625 Archived-At: Drew Adams wrote: > `delete-blank-lines' treats SPC, TAB, and newline as whitespace. > Shouldn't it also treat form-feed (aka \f, aka ^L) as whitespace? > While it's logically formally a whitespace class character, I'm quite unconvinced it would "feel right" to me. formfeed is usually put in much more rarely and with more forethought than space/tab/newline. It's also not "blank" in one possibly important sense: in emacs "out-of-box" it shows up as a quite visible "^L", whereas SPC/TAB/newline are invisible unless you turn on whitespace. So delete-blank-lines would end up deleting lines, that from a naive viewpoint, look like they "have something on them". Imagine you've got a text file with "page breaks" in it (represented as formfeeds as is/was the convention (see "C-x [" / "C-x ]" !)): ^L alpha bravo charlie[] ^L delta epsilon Say I hit C-x C-o where the point [] is. I wouldn't just delete those stray blank lines on the first page, I'd suddenly merge two pages. So I strongly suspect changing it would annoy people who still sprinkle ^L through their code or other files for pagination. Something I guess I personally don't do so much anymore (got a laser printer not a dot matrix...), but anyway.