Re: position on changing defaults?

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm) writes:
>> I haven't thought hard enough yet about what his suggestion does, so
>> could you expand on its downsides?
>
> 1) It binds special commands to the shifted keys, which doesn't
>    work for minor modes which put different commands on the
>    non-shifted keys.

Let's split the discussion into two separate issues though:

 (1) how to turn on shift-selection -- binding keys vs. special
     detection of commands

 (2) How to turn _off_ shift-selection -- post-command-hook
     vs. transient-mark-mode "only mode" vs. ...

From what I've seen of the discussion, these two points are orthogonal.

> 2) C-h k S-down doesn't show the doc string of the original command.

Well obviously that's a simple matter of writing the right doc
strings...

> 3) It only works with transient-mark-mode off, so explicit
>    region start C-SPC has no highlighting.

My supposition is that this issue can be fixed with simple changes to
the existing "only mode" to make it support this new usage better.

> 4) The list of supported keys/commands is not complete.

Er, _that's_ obviously a simple matter of writing more wrappers (and the
wrappers are trivial).

To be honest I don't think it's necessary to support every single
movement command emacs has, only the common ones, and the ones supported
by other apps (and their native emacs equivalents).

The critical thing is to let people's muscle-memory do the right thing,
and the other apps they get this muscle memory from usually have a very
limited set of keybindings anyway.

> 5) This approach is already used by s-mark and pc-selection-mode...

So?  Maybe they (or some variant of them) are good candidates to
implement this functionality for default-enabling.

-Miles

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