Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> Will it be enabled by default in Emacs Lisp mode?

I'd prefer that, yes.  I suggested doing this for Emacs developers first, in the 
master branch.  Eli thought this too eager, so I did not install it.  Perhaps we 
should revisit this at some point.  In the meantime I've put the following into 
my ~/.emacs startup file:

(if (fboundp 'electric-quote-mode)
     (electric-quote-mode))

and this does enable electric quoting in Emacs Lisp mode.


> What practical advantage justifies this complexity?

There are practical advantages to a quoting style that can't easily be confused 
with ordinary Lisp code involving ' and `.  We've already done this in the Emacs 
manuals' Info files, and the idea is to extend this to *Help* buffers (already 
done in the master branch) and to diagnostics (not yet done).  This will provide 
a more consistent interface within Emacs.

Also, quoting with single quotes is easier for most non-experts to read. 
Emacs's traditional style of quoting with grave accent and apostrophe is 
idiosyncratic and is offputting for many new users; it used to work well in 
displays long ago and it was reasonably common in GNU applications, but that's 
no longer true and now it's one more thing to learn when using Emacs.  I have 
some interest and experience in this, as my assistants and I introduce Emacs to 
an average of about one new user per day.  It would be better for Emacs to use a 
quoting style similar to what people are accustomed to, so that they are not 
distracted by it.