Re: [External] : Turning on savehist-mode by default

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

>> savehist-mode is a useful mode which is turned on by many Emacs
>> users. It matches the default behavior of programs like bash and
>> vim, which save command history by default.  I suggest that we
>> should find some way to enable savehist by default.
>
> Why?  It's trivial to turn it on.  As you
> say, many users (moi aussi) do so.
>
> There are a zillion minor modes that many
> users find useful to turn on by default.
> It doesn't follow that `emacs -Q' should
> turn on any of them by default.

If something is done by (practically) everyone, especially when it is
something that (practically) all beginners would be interested in, I
wouldn't dismiss the proposal to enable it by default.  How many
features satisfy this condition shouldn't matter.  After all, there are
already a number of features that are enabled by default, like
show-paren-mode, that individually are easy to enable, if you know how
to do it.  The issue is that beginners neither know how to do it, nor
what all the options are that they might be interested in.

IMO the more important question when considering to enable a feature
OOTB, is if it will inconvenience any existing users.  I don't think
there should be any issues with savehist-mode, but I might not know of
some issue?  Been using it myself as well for a while.

On a related topic, I have been running a configuration generator that
has been mentioned here on the list for a while now
(https://emacs.amodernist.com/), that could provide opt-in participation
in statistics of what features people are interested in.  That might
help ground matters like these in somewhat more empirical data, or least
a different perspective.

-- 
Philip Kaludercic