Re: Suggestion: two new commands: beginning-of-list and end-of-list

[arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

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>> Small conventience might matter to people.
>> With backward-up-list you have to press at least one more
>> time, or if you are in a doc string you have to invoke
>> it again.
> ( ... )
>Small or big, that's up to anyone to decide. We take it.
>
>Emacs including Emacs Lisp has had a huge problem and has it
>still, and that is to neglect simple, small things.
>
>  ( ... )
>
>Speed, ergonomics and convenience in _everything_.
>Youngers don't read manual (most of them), they expect
>everything to be great day 1. And why not? In a way I agree.
>and 2) senior citizens cannot or have no time, mental
>discipline to acquire vast new skills. And as for professional
>IT people - what they need is actually the same, speed,
>ergonomics, convenience, because they need to be productive
>(and also enjoy/being able to work with the software all day
>every day).
>
>  ( ... )
>
>Streamline everything, cut corners for real with technology -
>don't rely on mere humans to implement human-invented
>conventions,

Sorry for cutting up a bit, I think it was well-formulated by you.
You are on the point most of the time. I just shortened a bit to
underline the most important points you made (in my opinions).

At least looking from the online questions, I think you are correct
about people either just looking at completion options, and probably
not reading the manual. I think for many users even something as
simple as this would be an improvement in Emacs:

(defun beginning-of-list ()
  "Move cursor to the beginning of current list."
  (interactive)
  (call-interactively #'backward-up-list)
  (forward-char))

(defun end-of-list ()
  "Move cursor to the end of current list"
  (interactive)
  (call-interactively #'up-list)
  (backward-char))

The naming is more descriptive of what commands do, and they automate
something. Automation is good, computers should do the work for humans
not the other way around. I would though argue that the other definition
of beginning/end-of-list are more convenient since they properly jump
out of the literal strings .

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