Re: draft for DEL key poll

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

Hi Alan,

> I sincerely hope we won't be introducing too many more behaviours
> which are "standard" in modern GUIs.

Yes, I hope we incorporate (or invent) only behaviors that make sense
and improve editing.  And in this concrete case (or, say, comment-dwim,
M-;), I actually like this special behavior.

> > Some Emacs commands perform a certain operation on the region when
> > it is active.  In general, this "act on region" behavior does not
> > draw a distinction between a region made with the mouse (or
> > shift-selection) and a region made "normally" (e.g. by C-SPC
> > followed by point motion).  In previous Emacs releases, a special
> > exception was made for the DEL and delete keys.  This exception has
> > now been dropped.
>
> I cannot let you get away with this epistemological conflation.  These
> other commands do not act _ON_ the region.  They act _IN_ the region.
> delete was not previously an exception - they did their normal thing
> at the boundary of the region.

Well, there's no way to be *not* at the boundary of the region, right?
So there couldn't be any special behavior if at the region boundaries
any command had to act "normally."

> As a matter of interest, in the proposed default configuration, how
> does one delete a single character at a boundary of an "active"
> region?

I deactivate the region (C-g), delete the character (DEL), and
reactivate the region with `C-x C-x'.  But this situation occurs (for
me) much less frequently than the situation where I want to delete the
complete active region, so I'm happy that I can now simply hit DEL
instead of C-w.

Bye,
Tassilo