Re: A feature to go to last edit locations

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Daniel Martín <mardani29@yahoo.es>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2023 19:59:03 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> From: Daniel Martín <mardani29@yahoo.es>
> >> Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2023 18:41:20 +0100
> >> 
> >> 
> >> Some IDEs and text editors provide a feature to go to the position of
> >> the last edit location across all buffers.  For example, in Eclipse or
> >> IntelliJ IDEA, this feature is under Navigate, Last Edit Location.  In
> >> Vim, this feature is called a "change list jump" [1], but it seems to
> >> work in a per-buffer basis.
> >> 
> >> The closest thing in Emacs is pop-global-mark, but it's not quite the
> >> same feature.
> >
> > Emacs also has registers.
> 
> Yes, but registers still require that users explicitly save the position
> in a register beforehand.  Users may be editing a file, then switch to
> another file (or to another part of the same file) and then get a bit
> lost and ask themselves "where is what I was editing before?".  If they
> haven't saved their position in a register or in the mark ring, Emacs
> can't help them.

Given how much one moves during editing, I have hard time imagining
how a command that returns me to "the last place I edited" could be
useful without me telling Emacs which of those places is important and
which isn't.  If you invent a mechanism to save "the last location"
automatically, you are going to add a facility that will have a high
probability of false positives.

In any case, whatever method of deducing automatically which place to
record, I think it's better to build the feature on top of registers,
since they are already equipped for saving and restoring locations.