AW: delete-selection-mode

["Berndl, Klaus" <klaus.berndl@capgemini-sdm.com>]

Since Emacs editing interferes with typical editing commands today my vote is "yes".

Of course this is a little bit provoking, so please do not feel offened!

But IMHO the following is fact: Today Emacs has very strong competitors concerning "what is the most effective way to code my programs" - a lot of (commercial or free or open source) so called IDEs have adopted some of the pure editing power of Emacs but offer on top some power Emacs still lacks today, as for example real, fast and powerful refactoring, code navigation and other goodies you need much more for effective Code-development than some certain Emacs-specials. Well, with integrating CEDET Emacs has began to go the right direction but far away from the goal. Fact is, a lot of people which do not develop for open source but are employee at IT-companies develop with commercial IDEs cause of the advantages above. But this is not the only reason: Currently there are some quite standards concerning look and feel and also interaction with an editor/IDE. If these standard are the best approaches is not the question, we have simply to accept that there are these standards people expect when working with text-editing. And dealing with selections is one of these standards and it make NO sense to fight against it. IMHO Emacs must drop the inhibition  threshold a lot of people still have to engage in Emacs. But for these Emacs must go out from its corner especially concerning fundamental and basic interactions of the user with its tool. many many user wants to go well known paths here. If this inhibition  threshold falls then Emacs newbies would be more willing to dig into Emacs and to explore the delicacies and "unique selling points" Emacs can offer compared with other IDEs...

Take a look at gimp, one of the most successfull open source piece of code (well, a really big piece ;-): Gimp's success grows a.a. because gimp offers that the user can owrk with gimp in the quite same way as with photoshop - whereas the latter one is a defacto-standard in image editing. next gimp 2.8. will offer a single-window mode simply because people expect it!

Emacs should offer what people want and expect if it wants to have the chance to competite with other powerful IDEs.

To make a long story short: Emacs is a great peace of software and i like it very much (otherwise i would not have developed ECB). And it has really earned the chance to "win" more users, also from the "other side"... Fot this the default setting of Emacs should follow the defacto standards. And all Emacs old-timers should have an easy way to go back to the Emacs-mode to interact with their editor...maybe Emacs could display an hint for new users that there are more - and maybe even better ways - to interact with Emacs - and how to deal with that but the default should be the standard - not the Emacs standard but the "world" standards.

best regards
Klaus
________________________________________
Von: emacs-devel-bounces+klaus.berndl=sdm.de@gnu.org [emacs-devel-bounces+klaus.berndl=sdm.de@gnu.org] im Auftrag von David Kastrup [dak@gnu.org]
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 17. März 2010 11:12
An: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Betreff: Re: delete-selection-mode

Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> writes:

>>> delete-selection-mode would be the default too, that's what everything
>>> on the desktop does...
>
> I agree with Richard that the primary concern is doing what is useful
> for newcomers.  One of the most frequent questions they ask is how to do
> what most other editors do - to replace selected text with a typed
> character or with yanked text, and to delete the region by typing <delete>
> without copying it to the kill-ring.
>
> What they are asking for is delete-selection-mode,
> but they can't find it in the documentation because
> the feature name says nothing to beginners, and
> they expect to take this functionality for granted.
>
> Some recent examples of such problems:
>
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.help/60992
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.help/45623
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.help/42402
>
> Is that reason enough to enable delete-selection-mode by default?

Since it interferes with Emacs-typical editing command sequences, my
vote is "no".

The question you appear concerned with is more "how can we make
beginners shut up" rather than "how can we make beginners more
productive with Emacs".

Perhaps we should offer a submenu in "Help" about "Judicious differences
to other editors", with rationales, an introducting section saying "Some
default behaviors we considered useful enough to make them different
from other editors, so we recommend that you try to get acquainted with
the suggested mode of operation before deciding against it", maybe even
with clickable links to customize-variable where you can turn some
feature like delete-selection-mode on (and off again!).

We could even go as far as to mark some customizable variables as
"voteable" and have a mechanism where you can send all of your personal
voteable settings to emacs-votes@gnu.org.

--
David Kastrup