Re: Suggested experimental test

[Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org>]

>>> It isn't a small change to remove a feature completely.  When asked to 
>>> keep _a_ binding, it has been meet with silence and it has been more 
>>> important to inconvinence users than to listen to them, so I can only 
>>> assume that this will a similar case for C-o.
>>
>> Your assumption is wrong.
>
> Neither center-line nor center-paragraph have been given an alternative 
> binding.  The same is also applicable for facemenu. Despite requests for 
> it.
>

This is another topic, unrelated to the current one, and as I said earlier 
I'm currently experimenting ways to readd these commands.  I do this 
thinking specifically of you.

>> Please have a look at the proposed experiment: it moves open-line to 
>> repeated C-o.
>
> A proposal is not reality, and such a behaviour would be yet again 
> beyond annoying.  How about doing polls first instead of doing this 
> blind experiments
>

What kind of poll would you like to see?  What would you consider to be a 
significant enough fraction of Emacs users?  How would you poll them? 
There has been a survey a few months ago, and in spite of the fact that 
there were more than 7000 replies, many complained that the results were 
not representative.

Moreover, polling with abstract questions is not a good way to discuss UI 
changes.  The point of conducting experiments on the trunk is that users 
concretely experiment potential changes.

>
> where it will be far to late when these changes sneak into Emacs for 
> them to be changed back.
>

Fortunately, such changes are easy to revert for users who would dislike 
them, and the way to revert them is documented in the NEWS file.

As I said, there have been many changes even to the C-LETTER and M-LETTER 
keys in the past, when it was thought that the key in question could be 
used in a better way.  Another example, which I forgot in my previous 
list, is C-c, which was changed from exit-recursive-edit to a prefix key 
in Emacs 16, and exit-recursive-edit was moved to C-M-c.