Re: please make line-move-visual nil

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 11:29:48AM +0200, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>> On Mon, 25 May 2009, Miles Bader wrote:

> > "Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@gnu.org> writes:
> >> This is not a useful way to carry a conversation.  People, lots of
> >> people, have complained about this behaviour, so it needs to be
> >> re-examined.

> > I don't really get the impression that "Lots of people" are
> > complaining actually (seems more like a few people, at high volume).

> Add me to the list of people complaining, then. I think that it's
> counter-intuitive to move point horizontally when vertical movement was
> asked for. The default should be changed back to nil.

That's most people's reasoning, I think.  Trouble is, they disagree about
what "horizontal" and "vertical" mean; is it "horizontal" in a logical
line, or "horizontal" in a visible line?  Which comes back to the
question "what do we mean by a line?".

I don't do much with wide buffers - occasionally I read log files with
long lines, occasionally I have to edit text in the
paragraph-is-a-single-very-long-line style.  For both of these scenarios,
I prefer line-move-visual enabled, since I find the shock of C-n "jumping
three lines" very disconcerting.  But that's just my personal preference;

I appreciate other people's arguments for leaving l-m-visual nil.  The
fact that somebody like Drew, who's normally so calm and collected, is so
steadfastly opposed to the change is a strong argument in itself.

I disagree with Eli that defaults are "only" defaults: they're the
settings we impose on new users, and are critically important.  If
they're bad defaults, they could irritate and exasperate users for months
or years before those users eventually change them.  (C-n adding new
lines onto the ends of files (which was the default in Emacs <= 20)
springs to mind here).

Add me to the list of people emphatically and loudly abstaining.  It's
important to get this right, though.

> Also, at former times the user community was asked before such UI
> changes were done (I remember polls about C-x 0, M-g, C-x C-w, and
> C-x C-q at least). Why isn't this done any more?

This practice was (tacitly) abandoned in spring 2008, when a much more
massive change in Emacs's defaults was committed before discussions about
it had really got underway.  Stefan and Yidong did not require that
change to be reverted during those discussions.

> Ulrich

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nürnberg).