Johan Bockgård wrote:

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

It's not even a reinvention, but a renaming of the wheel that you are
apparently calling for, and I have yet to see the difference you are
aiming for from the current behavior.


I think the idea is that the mark should evaporate when the highlighting
goes away.  (It's like, you know, "transient".)

Yes, that's right. Except that "tentative" is a better word than "'transient".

If it's tentative, then maybe it's not going to last -- it can completely go
away.   That's "tentative".

"Transient" means "passing through".   A transient mark can come and go
-- transience means only that it wanders between "active" and "deactivated".

"Transient mark" is a good name for a transient mark -- it reflects its
nature. Sometimes it's around. Sometimes it's not.   But it's always
somewhere until explicitly removed.

"Tentative mark" is a good name for the functionality people seem to
be groping towards.   It reflects the nature of the semantics found in other
applications and that, serendipitously, fits in with mark stacks in a natural
way.   I think that once upon a time someone tried to come up with
tentative marks and missed, coming up with transient mark mode as an
approximation.

-t