Re: A wish, a plea

[Hacksaw <hacksaw@hacksaw.org>]

Richard Stallman wrote:
>     Making *scratch* or even something like *unnamed* readonly would
>     pretty much defeat its intent.
>
> The principal intent of *scratch* is to be the current buffer when
> Emacs starts up.  Secondarily, it provides a place to enter notes you
> don't want to save, and eval Lisp expressions.  Making it read-only,
> so you need to type C-x C-q before inserting anything, would not spoil
> the principal intent.  It would slightly inconvenience the secondary
> intent, but that MIGHT be worth while in exchange for making it less
> likely to lose data.
>
> I am not sure this change is a good idea, but it isn't ridiculous.
>   

I don't mind the idea that *scratch* would be the first thing I see. My 
only concern is that the editor not get in the way of whatever I have to 
do. (This is one of the reason I don't care for vi: I can't just start 
typing, I have to figure out what mode I'm in.)

My preference would be for scratch to actually save everything. Don't 
treat it like mere workspace to be tossed when you figure something out, 
treat it as a fairly limitless notebook in which you can record your 
ideas, try out things, and hopefully never lose anything you didn't 
explicitly erase. I would make it autosave fairly often, like after an 
eval, as well as after 250 characters, and such, assuming the cost of 
appending to a huge file isn't crazy. (Even then it's easy to imagine a 
scheme with files stitched together to make a feeling of being a single 
file.)

Think about a future where you can mark a section of the *scratch* as 
being C or Python or whatever, and emacs will do it's best to evaluate 
that chunk and insert the results as it does with Lisp Interactive mode.

After all, disk space is crazily cheap.

Thanks for everyone's thoughts on this matter, by the way.