Re: delete-selection-mode as default

[Filipp Gunbin <fgunbin@fastmail.fm>]

On 09/09/2018 13:45 +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> Hello, Eli.
>
> On Fri, Sep 07, 2018 at 09:47:52 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Feel free to start a user poll, though: if it turns out I'm the only
>> one who thinks delete-selection-mode is inappropriate in programming
>> modes, we can make it the default; I can easily turn it off in my
>> configuration.  Though I would urge people to actually try this in
>> programming modes before responding, and in any case the poll should
>> request to provide the major modes used with the responses.
>
> No, you're not the only disliker of d-s-mode.  I utterly detest it, to
> the point that Emacs's lack of this feature was one of the things which
> attracted me to Emacs in the first place.  At last, an editing program
> with a rational, well thought out interface!  A thing I hated about these
> other programs was that I could have spent a long time building up a
> (highlighted) region in them, only to lose it irretrievably on carelessly
> typing an arrow key without <shift>.  As a result of things like that, I
> was never able to relax whilst using these programs - I had to remain
> hyper-alert to avoid the above sort of lossage.

Much the same for me.

I think that if we ever make d-s-m on by default, we should add a line
or two about it in tutorial.  And also about transient-mark-mode (and
maybe visual-line-mode).  It's especially new users (for whom the
tutorial is designed) that might be unaware of different ways of
handling selection.  They may not like "the old way", but at least
they'll know about it.

Filipp