Re: C-d deleting region considered harmful

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     But it's also the only such change that really matters for
>     newbie-friendless.
>
> I am not convinced it does.  The case in which newbies would expect
> Backspace to delete the region is after mouse-selecting it,

No.  Newbies actually use the keyboard too, you know (even if they're
not used to Emacs)...

Anyway, having mouse-regions be "magic" is confusingly inconsistent, and
a bad UI generally.  That was a big wart on Emacs in the past.

It's obviously impossible to have perfect defaults, because we're trying
to unify a widely disparate set of user experiences into one UI.  A
change that makes things better for some often makes others unhappy.

There's little we can do other than trying to minimize unhappiness, but
at least we can (1) keep things customizable, so those that just can't
deal with a change can easily find relief, and (2) try to make Emacs' UI
broadly consistent, so that's it's at least easy for users to form a
mental-model of how things work (and easy to document)...

-Miles

-- 
Carefully crafted initial estimates reward you not only with
reduced computational effort, but also with understanding and
increased self-esteem.         -- Numerical methods in C,
  Chapter 9. "Root Finding and Nonlinear Sets of Equations"