Re: Turning on savehist-mode by default

[Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
>> Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2023 11:01:22 -0800
>>
>> I didn't see any serious objections, so perhaps we could move forward
>> with this proposal.  Eli, WDYT?
>
> There wasn't a compelling reason to turn it on, either.  "Other
> programs save history" is not enough in my book.  Other programs also
> have the equivalent of recentf ON by default, but we don't.

This is my reasoning:

Users these days will expect that their history is saved between
invocations of Emacs, as most other programs do that (including
e.g. bash and even many languages REPLs).  This customization is common
in many starter kits, and is frequently recommended to beginners.  Not
doing it is somewhat surprising and inconvenient.

Meanwhile, I see few drawbacks to enabling it.

As for `recentf', I think it's a bit different from `savehist-mode', as
it's only used in particular use cases.  I can only think of: mousing in
the menu bar and calling `M-x recentf-open'.  On the other hand,
`savehist-mode' affects anyone that uses the minibuffer and knows to
press `M-p'.

> On disadvantage that was never discussed is that if we turn it on by
> default, we'd need to preload savehist.

I didn't check how it affects the size of a running Emacs.  The ELC is
only around 12 KB here, FWIW.

> All in all, I'm not sure we should do this.  Perhaps a more wide user
> poll is in order.

I suppose we could ask people on /r/emacs, if that would help.