From: David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>
To: Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>
Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: shouldn't `delete-blank-lines' treat form-feed as whitespace?
Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:35:49 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <4B8ED635.7010102@harpegolden.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4CB6D99021EF440EAB10FFDB2740FE8B@us.oracle.com>
Drew Adams wrote:
> `delete-blank-lines' treats SPC, TAB, and newline as whitespace.
> Shouldn't it also treat form-feed (aka \f, aka ^L) as whitespace?
>
While it's logically formally a whitespace class character, I'm quite
unconvinced it would "feel right" to me. formfeed is usually put in
much more rarely and with more forethought than space/tab/newline.
It's also not "blank" in one possibly important sense: in emacs
"out-of-box" it shows up as a quite visible "^L", whereas
SPC/TAB/newline are invisible unless you turn on whitespace.
So delete-blank-lines would end up deleting lines, that from a naive
viewpoint, look like they "have something on them".
Imagine you've got a text file with "page breaks" in it (represented as
formfeeds as is/was the convention (see "C-x [" / "C-x ]" !)):
^L
alpha
bravo
charlie[]
^L
delta
epsilon
Say I hit C-x C-o where the point [] is. I wouldn't just delete those
stray blank lines on the first page, I'd suddenly merge two pages.
So I strongly suspect changing it would annoy people who still sprinkle
^L through their code or other files for pagination. Something I guess
I personally don't do so much anymore (got a laser printer not a dot
matrix...), but anyway.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2010-03-03 21:35 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2010-02-28 20:44 shouldn't `delete-blank-lines' treat form-feed as whitespace? Drew Adams
2010-03-03 19:32 ` Juri Linkov
2010-03-03 19:54 ` Drew Adams
2010-03-04 4:28 ` Stefan Monnier
2010-03-05 8:48 ` Eli Zaretskii
2010-03-06 17:57 ` Juri Linkov
2010-03-06 18:56 ` Eli Zaretskii
2010-03-03 21:35 ` David De La Harpe Golden [this message]
2010-03-03 22:21 ` Drew Adams
2010-03-04 1:40 ` Miles Bader
2010-03-04 6:21 ` Drew Adams
[not found] <E1No0yT-0007vs-HZ@mail.fsf.org>
2010-03-06 22:34 ` Jonathan Yavner
2010-03-07 4:14 ` Eli Zaretskii
2010-03-07 4:34 ` Jonathan Yavner
2010-03-07 17:42 ` Eli Zaretskii
2010-03-07 18:11 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2010-03-07 5:08 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
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