Hi, Kim.

No, I am not a CUA user although, from hearing it described
here I have a pretty good sense of how it works.

I don't mean the following effusive praise to be condescending
but, really, it sounds like excellent work.  Except.....

I gather you "inherited" TMM.   CUA would probably be just as
excellent work, and probably simpler, if TMM had been better
designed.  

I'm trying not to be *too* much of a pill on the dev list of
a project I'm not otherwise active in but I do think that the
accumulated mistake of the original TMM can probably be
usefully fixed, as an alternative to making it the default behavior.

-t


Kim F. Storm wrote: 
Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net> writes:

  
That doesn't give a "modal" system where sometimes C-v means
scroll-down and other times it means PASTE.   
    

With CUA on, C-v always means paste, so it is not modal.  
Neither is C-z (undo).

C-x and C-c are modal with CUA on, but have you actually tried it?
In practice, it is very rarely notiable.  

Of course, I've used Emacs before CUA came along - but I wrote CUA --
and still use it -- because it drove me crazy to have to use different
control sequences in Emacs than in every other application I used.

And since Emacs was the only application that was different, I decided
to implement the necessary functions to make it work _good enough_ to
make me switch comfortably between Emacs and other applications.

  
Emacs documentation will still be saying things like "Use C-x f to
open a file."    That's a burden on new users who elect to remap
C-x to CUT (and some other key to C-x).    But it's a small burden
because it's just those few keys and the rules about how to type those
characters apply consistently, all the time.
    

So to avoid the (tranparent) modal behaviour of CUA, you shuffle everything
around instead.  I don't see that as a better - or simpler - solution.
At least it is a solution to a problem which doesn't exist IMHO.

  
-t


Richard Stallman wrote:
    
Shift-selection is fine, but I don't think we should change the
meaning of C-c, C-v and C-x.

All else being equal, it would be better to be compatible with other
programs, including in this.  But all else is not equal, and this
change would not fit into Emacs.
      

In practice, it fits very well, but I have no problem with it being
an option which you have to turn on explicitly.  But it would be
nice to mention it on the splash screen.

Also, if shift-select is implemented as default, I think many users
will be utterly confused if C-x doesn't do cut and C-c doesn't copy.

So all-in-all I really don't see why everybody is making a lot of
fuzz over making shift-select a 1st class emacs feature -- when
we could just as well just leave it to CUA mode to DTRT, but possibly
make a few enhancements to basic Emacs functionalities to assist CUA
mode to do its work.

But once again, I know this is a lost battle...