Re: Suggestion: Mapping of M-g should be goto-line

[Danilo Segan <dsegan@gmx.net>]

Hi Juanma,

Today at 12:55, Juanma Barranquero wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Mar 2004 12:23:34 +0100
> Danilo Segan <dsegan@gmx.net> wrote:
>
>> That's only a reason to educate them better, not to adjust behaviour.
>
> Many people don't have the time to be "educated". I've introduced a few
> friends to Emacs and they're using it happily, but they just won't spend
> the time to learn features they feel they're not going to need.

Sorry if I sounded too harsh -- I just want the defaults to be good,
and I'm not at all claiming to know what they should be.  I'm
bringing issues and/or solutions to issues brought up in discussion,
which are more "Emacs-ey" than simply using goto-line by hand.

With that aside, your claim seems to be spurious at best: you've got
friends who "just won't spend the time to learn features they feel
they're not going to need" -- if they're not going to need them, why
would they care if goto-line is easily accessible, or not?  OTOH, if
they're going to need them, we should make them learn next-error, not
goto-line (at least IMHO, it's related to the issue of what is
officially supported/recommended way of doing things with Emacs).

>> I suggest you try "emacsclient -n +5 path/to/file"
>
> I don't use emacsclient, but I *do* use gnuclient.exe and gnuserv.el
> (I'm on Windows), which have the same functionality. Still, I routinely
> use M-x goto-line.

Thanks for mentioning that.  But two of us, _who_ do know of alternate
[that's important, since it may be the case that many people don't
know about them], and (arguably) better way to open a file at specific
point from terminal, are far from a good statistical sample (and even
our views differ).

>> For those that are not willing to go the "better" path (of course,
>> if it becomes a consensus that this is actually "better", I'm not
>> insisting this is), they can always customize their keybindings. 
>
> Yes, that's what I've done, so I certainly won't insist on M-g being
> goto-line. Still, making goto-line more accesible that "set default font"
> seems sensible for all these "uneducated" people out there which don't
> want to spend too much time learning Emacs, i.e., the exact people to
> whom the customize stuff is addressed...

I'd actually go the different route.  I'd suggest making next-error
even more accessible (eg. using M-g for that), since it's infinitely
more useful than setting default face.  With that done, one might even
put goto-line to C-x `, or something.  Lets not knowingly hide very
useful features such as next-error, and expose goto-line instead.

(If you want a shortcut to make some sense, it's easy: "error" in
Serbian is "greška" [so M-g], and you can easily remember it, right? ;)

> In fact, I routinely have Emacs running all the time and have an alias
> "em=gnuclient -qF" so I can edit files with "em filename.ext". gnuclient
> is also my editor-cmd in Subversion, so Emacs comes forward to edit
> Subversion commit logs, etc. etc.
>
> Really, I *do* know there are alternatives. I use some of them, and the
> ones I don't use, is because they're not that useful/comfortable to me.

(I'd rather put the emphasis on "I": "*I* do know there are
alternatives", since I'd like to point out that many others who
reach for goto-line probably don't)

The last time I used Windows, I found its terminal to be very
unusable.  So, I would tend to blame incomfortability on that
instead. :)

> I refuse to be "educated" to do things in ways I've already discarded ;)

For those who're already long-time users of Emacs (like probably
yourself), there's no point in "educating" -- you know how to set it
up to suit your preferences, and have probably developed your own set
of preferences over time, which differ from defaults. 

Cheers,
Danilo