Re: Poll about proposed change in DEL (aka Backspace) and Delete

[Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday 04 October 2011 05:28:20 MBR wrote:
> As things currently stand, there are three different kinds of delete
> functionality I use: delete 1 character backward, delete 1 character
> forward, and delete the marked region.  For over 25 years I've been used
> to those functions being invoked by BACKSPACE, C-d, and C-w
> respectively.  Yes, I could retrain myself, just as I had to do years
> ago when IBM put the CTRL key in the wrong place.  But it will
> inevitably be a big pain.

How often do you mark a region and then decide to delete a few characters here 
and there while it is marked?

When you mark a region, is it not reasonable to expect that the next action 
will be applied to that region?
 
> If it weren't core functionality you were proposing changing the
> assignments of, I probably wouldn't care.  But delete functionality is
> some of the most basic functionality of any editor, just as stop
> functionality is some of the most basic functionality of a car.  What do
> you think would happen if some car manufacturer decided to violate the
> established standard that the brake pedal is to the left of the gas
> pedal?  If that were to happen, I'm pretty sure there would suddenly be
> a whole lot more car crashes because people would be confused about
> which pedal does what.  Changing keystroke assignments isn't going to
> cause life-threatening crashes, but it will inevitably cause millions of
> pico-crashes -- not anything that's going to cause serious harm, but
> enough to cause real annoyance.

If you like analogies, I'd say that there is a certain standard among everyone 
about the position of the brake pedal, except in Emacs cars which have a 
different (ancient-style) position. I think it is quite reasonable, in the 
interest of minimizing confusion and car crashes, that Emacs cars adjust the 
pedal positions to what every driver expects (with the possible exception of 
old-style Emacs drivers who can keep the old pedals if they wish). ;-)

> I remember back during the Apple look-and-feel wars you were
> distributing a flyer arguing that if look-and-feel had been the law of
> the land when the typewriter keyboard was first designed, every
> typewriter company would have had to invent its own incompatible layout,
> and instead of typists we'd have Remington keyboard typists,
> Smith-Corona typists, Olivetti typists, etc.  Keystroke letter
> assignments on a typewriter and keystroke function assignments for
> critical functionality in an editor should change seldom or never.

Well, today you have Emacs typists, and everyone else. Why shouldn't Emacs 
change, for the greater benefit of having a uniform keystroke assignments (at 
least those most basic and fundamental ones) across all text editors?

> It sounds like the goal here is to make Emacs behave like MS Word.
> Why?  If I wanted to use Word, I'd run Word or Libre Office.

No, the goal here is to make Emacs behave like every other editor does (bar a 
couple of them maybe).

I really don't see a point in comparing Emacs to Word, nor I understand why 
people consider this kind of change as "behave like Word". If some feature or 
behavior is good and useful in an editor, it is quite likely that most editors 
and word processors will have it (yes, including even Word). So why deny 
yourself a useful feature only because Word also has it? Furthermore, most of 
the text editors and word processors out there have the same feature, why do 
folks tend to single out MS Word to compare against?

Best, :-)
Marko