Re: delete-selection-mode

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> writes:
>>> So do fringes, toolbars, menus, scrollbars, the splash screen, syntax
>>> highlighting and almost every other change we've made to Emacs over
>>> the years.
>>
>> None of them destroy your text given the same keystrokes.
>
> You can accidentally type C-w and destroy your text.

They are very different cases:

Hitting C-w when you didn't intend to is a relatively uncommon
occurrence.  When you _do_ intend to hit C-w, because the command is
inherently associated with the region, you're _much_ more likely to be
aware of the state of the region.

Accidentally deleting text because of an inadvertently selected (often
very small) region, on the other hand, is quite easy to do.  The problem
here is that the very very common case of inserting text does _not_
(normally) depend on the region, so it's very easy for a user to start
typing without being aware of the region's state.

[The reason I know about this annoying issue with "type to delete",
BTW, is because it regularly happens to me (not in Emacs, obviously!]

-Miles

-- 
.Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing.