Re: v for view-mode

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Evans Winner <thorne@timbral.net> writes:
>     Since "view-mode" sucks in just about every conceivable
>     way, and is AFAICT, un-salvageable, here's a more
>     minimalist (but less sucky) replacement you might enjoy:
>
> As someone who uses view-mode every day and finds it pretty
> satisfactory (and your replacement would not, in itself be
> so, for my purposes) I am interested to know exactly what it
> is that you think sucks about view-mode.

It's a huge mess of needlessly complicated (and often downright wrong,
e.g., all the bizarre code that does size calculation, which has no
obvious purpose, and yet screws up common usage scenarios) code.
It gets even the most basic functionality wrong; e..g, the reason I
whipped up more-mode is that hitting SPC in view-mode seemed to scroll
by _more_ than one page in a particular buffer!  Why?  Who knows, I
don't care, but even a simple C-v does the right thing.

Because view-mode such a huge mess, it's hard to fix (technically).
Moreover, for better or for worse, people on emacs-devel are very
conservative about changing it, so even the smallest change requires a
vast amount of time arguing on this list.

Since I just want a simple pager that actually works correctly in the
most common case, it's far, far, easier to just write one than expend a
lot of effort on a turd like view-mode.

-Miles

-- 
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