Re: C-d deleting region considered harmful

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

'afternoon, Chad,

On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 11:00:50AM -0700, Chad Brown wrote:
> Question for the people who dislike transient-mark-mode and it's
> related behaviors:

> Do you find yourself making an unwanted `highlighted region' using any
> other method than C-xC-x?  The potential candidates that come to mind
> are `C-space and movement', shift-selection, and mouse-sweep.

No, never.  I disabled transient-mark-mode a split microsecond after it
was thrust upon me.  I think most hackers who "dislike" this will have
done likewise.  By the way, "dislike" doesn't come close to how I regard
transient-mark-mode; visceral revulsion is closer to the mark and point.

I still occasionally get this ghastly effect (e.g. when I start emacs -Q
for some testing reason).  Sometime I'll get around to hacking my copy of
the place where this default is set.

> I used to dislike transient-mark-mode (back when it was called
> zmacs-region and I was using Epoch), and disabled it along with most
> of the `chrome', but at one point I intentionally tried working with
> all of the bells and whistles and found it helpful except when I was
> using C-xC-x often when editing code.  I spend more time editing text
> these days, and much less hoping around with C-xC-x, so I just live
> with the occasional distraction, but perhaps a way to invert the ARG
> of exchange-point-and-mark would let more emacs hackers enjoy the
> benefits of t-m-m without being annoyed by the spurious flashing/C-g.

I'm sure t-m-m could be made nicer.  For a start, it's a bumbling
conflation of three things which ought to be independently setable,
namely (i) Highligting of the region; (ii) a form of narrowing to the
region; (iii) disablement of some region commands.

In fact, if I could disable (i), that intrusive dark blue obliteration of
my font-lock and hi-lock highlighting, I might even get to try t-m-m.
But then, many of the config variables are so badly named
("transient-mark-mode" ought to be "transient-region-highlighting" since
the mark is no longer transient by default - all region commands are by
default executable) it would put me off even just setting these newspeak
variables.

BTW, I vote for C-d keeping its "do one thing and do it well" binding of
`delete-char', even though I might have disqualified myself from voting.
When I have to use inferior software I detest that software marking
regions without my consent and thereby forcing my right hand away from
the home position to remove this frivolous marking on pain of losing the
entire region.

In fact, I think I predicted the current confusion when the decision to
make t-m-m a default was taken.

> *Chad

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).