Re: I wish list-buffers used my current window when it listed my buffers

[Jay Cotton <jay.cotton@gmail.com>]

On Aug 16, 2013, at 6:51 PM, Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> wrote:

> Jay Cotton wrote:
>> Dan Espen wrote:
>>> I still think any tweaking of list-buffers is a waste of time.
>>> Just replace it with the electric version.
>> 
>> I hate to pick nits with the guy who seems closest to my POV on this
>> issue, but after using the electric version a little bit I did
>> notice some weirdness.
>> 
>> For instance, it clobbers C-x and a bunch of other huge
>> keybindings. I can't select text for the kill ring. I can't isearch
>> for the buffer I'm looking for.
> 
> Those are annoying deficiencies.  Not enough to turn me off to it.
> But definitely annoying that the interface isn't consistent with other
> parts of emacs.  Maybe it would be possible to fix those things.

Definitely possible, although I'm not sure how much we'd gain by fixing electric-buffer-list rather than just making list-buffers use the same window. (Which is trivial to implement (I know because I naively reimplemented the function before learning about affordances such as same-window-buffer-list, etc.) but extremely difficult to ship due to the certainty of broken workflows.

> 
> I have other things about electric-buffer-mode that annoy me.  It has
> nasty highlighting that I disable.  The latest version uses an ugly
> character set that I don't like but haven't been able to disable.
> 
>> I love the fact that it opens in the same window, but I can imagine
>> the dev group catching a lot of flak if they replaced the
>> 'list-buffers default with something so different as this.
> 
> I only wish that they would get in trouble for breaking long standing
> behavior!  Every time a I upgrade to a new release of emacs I spend a
> lot of time fixing things back to the way they were before.  They
> definitely don't seem to be holding back on changing major behaviors.
> 
> Bob

Ugrading 30+ year old software is tough stuff! :)

I'm relatively new to this list, but to be honest I find it refreshing to hear that you think the dev team isn't holding back too much on changing major behaviors. I mean, I feel your pain in the abstract, because it sucks to have a broken workflow. I hate it when new emacs breaks my .emacs.

But from my perspective, there's some old stuff in emacs that absolutely should be reconsidered given what we've learned over the years. And it's important for the team to be willing the break workflows when necessary for the greater good. And a lot of what breaks in my .emacs are *hacks* that I've been forced to employ for various embarrassing OCD programmer reasons. :) Like not wanting my windows messed up!

Anyway, I appreciate all your suggestions. Figuring it out as I go.

Thanks,
Jay