Re: "like other editors" [was: Re: Poll about proposed change in DEL (aka Backspace) and Delete]

[S Boucher <stbya@yahoo.com>]

----- Original Message -----

>( Again) Though some believe it makes more sense to bottom-post and/or respond 
> interlinearly, most people using email top-post.  So we should all start doing 
> what most people do.  :P

Is it just me that has the impression that you are being argumentative just for the sake of being argumentative?

Let me ask you: Leaving aside the technical merrits for a moment, if rms goes ahead with the change for the sake of being coherent with other applications and make it easier for the newbies, are you going to survive or are you going to give up Emacs?  How painful will the survival be?

> C-p - Print the file
> 
> C-n - New file
> 
> C-a - select All
> 
> C-q - Quit
> 
> These changes will make it easier for those new to emacs.  In that they are 
> culturally biased towards those who speak English, there are good reasons for 
> them.

Sigh! You like to be argumentative...

And we all know that Emacs is not the least bit biased towards English. 

C-p - previous-line
C-n - next-line
C-y - yank
C-k - kill-line

Furthermore, if - and that's a big IF - the various letter choices (C-a, C-w, C-x, etc) had  anything to do with ergonomics, those without a qwerty keyboards might be getting a raw deal.

I'm a long time emacs user and love it, but it's not like every decision ever made in emacs is always right.  I recall having to use C-x@ to set mark (that's having to type C-x S-2) to set mark in some instances when I couldn't get C-<space> to work.  Non-working C-<space> was probably one of the most frequent issue brought up in gnu.emacs.help back then.

We should really put this to rest, but that's just my opinion...