Re: delete-selection-mode

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>
> Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:06:05 -0700
> Cc: 'Juri Linkov' <juri@jurta.org>, 'Chong Yidong' <cyd@stupidchicken.com>,
> 	emacs-devel@gnu.org, 'Stefan Monnier' <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>,
> 	rms@gnu.org
> 
> How about starting with delete-selection-mode (regardless of whether it would
> become the default behavior - let's assume not, here), and trying to improve it
> so that it plays better with your use cases?

I think the only way to have the feature and leave everyone mildly
happy is to separate the ``deletable'' selection from the normal Emacs
region.  That is, introduce a new notion, let's call it ``selection'',
that is a portion of text which is defined by dragging the mouse or
moving the cursor with the Shift key pressed.  Let then this
``selection'' be deleted as in other GUI apps.  This is what newcomers
expect, they don't know about the region, so won't expect it to behave
like ``selection''.

Keeping our hands off the region will avoid the risk of infuriating
long time Emacs users.  It will also avoid the need to produce some
kind of heuristics for figuring out issues like this one:

> For example, you say that you don't want to delete the active region sometimes
> when you type text. Never? Sometimes? When? Maybe you can characterize the use
> cases better (to yourself at least).

I feel that any such heuristics, even if we succeed in coming up with
it, will be a hopelessly fragile pile of twisted little passages all
alike, that will break on us all the time and cause infinite
maintenance headaches.