<up> or <left> clearing the mark in Emacs 23.2

<up> or <left> clearing the mark in Emacs 23.2

[John McCabe]

I've only recently moved to Emacs 23.2 from 22.3, and I'm finding
something a bit odd and not sure where to look for details. It may be
something to do with my settings, and I'll upload my .emacs etc if
necessary, but I was hoping someone might just know the answer off the
top of their head.

On 22.3, with transient-mark-mode enabled, if I have a buffer of text,
go to the start using C-Home (beginning-of-buffer), set the mark
(C-@), go to the end of the buffer using C-S-End (end-of-buffer), then
go up a line using the up arrow (previous-line) or left arrow
(backward-char) then the highlighted region changes to between the
mark and the point as I think has been the case for many years.

On my 23.2 setup, which uses basically the same .emacs and other
initialisation files (so may have some obsolete configuration settings
still in there - don't know how to tell if these have changed meaning
or are really obsolete), when I do the above sequence of keypresses,
the highlighted region disappears when I press the up or left arrow.

Something seems to be clearing the mark when I do this.

If anyone can suggest why this is I'd really appreciate your help.

Thsnks

John

Re: <up> or <left> clearing the mark in Emacs 23.2

[John McCabe]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:16:30 -0400, Lowell Gilbert
<lgusenet@be-well.ilk.org> wrote:

>John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
>> I've only recently moved to Emacs 23.2 from 22.3, and I'm finding
>> something a bit odd and not sure where to look for details. It may be
>> something to do with my settings, and I'll upload my .emacs etc if
>> necessary, but I was hoping someone might just know the answer off the
>> top of their head.
>>
>> On 22.3, with transient-mark-mode enabled, if I have a buffer of text,
>> go to the start using C-Home (beginning-of-buffer), set the mark
>> (C-@), go to the end of the buffer using C-S-End (end-of-buffer), then
>> go up a line using the up arrow (previous-line) or left arrow
>> (backward-char) then the highlighted region changes to between the
>> mark and the point as I think has been the case for many years.
>>
>> On my 23.2 setup, which uses basically the same .emacs and other
>> initialisation files (so may have some obsolete configuration settings
>> still in there - don't know how to tell if these have changed meaning
>> or are really obsolete), when I do the above sequence of keypresses,
>> the highlighted region disappears when I press the up or left arrow.
>>
>> Something seems to be clearing the mark when I do this.
>>
>> If anyone can suggest why this is I'd really appreciate your help.
>
>I think it's something local to your configuration.  The way to check
>this is to run emacs with the '-q' option.  You also might want to look
>at the "Mark changes" section in the NEWS file (C-h n).

Thanks for those suggestions.

runemacs -q sometextfile.txt

from a command prompt (Windows 7 64-bit by the way) shows the same
behaviour.

However your pointer to the "Mark changes" section was really useful..
it seems to be a temporarily active regions thing:

"*** Temporarily active regions, created using shift-selection or
mouse-selection, are not necessarily deactivated in the next command.
They are only deactivated after point motion commands that are not
shift-translated, or after commands that would ordinarily deactivate
the mark in Transient Mark mode (e.g., any command that modifies the
buffer)."

If I do C-S-End, then up-arrow the highlighted region disappears, but
if I do S-<up> it doesn't. Similarly, if I do C-End then <up> it
doesn't disappear.

So - looks like it's a matter of getting used to using C-End instead
of C-S-End probably!

Thank you very much for your time!!

John