From: Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>
To: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused.
Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 16:48:15 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87bppdx8c0.fsf@cyd.mit.edu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20090528201529.GA4605@muc.de> (Alan Mackenzie's message of "Thu, 28 May 2009 20:15:29 +0000")
Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:
> The essence of my unhappiness is that "active" isn't defined. You've
> put in a formal @dfn{active}, but weaselled out of actually defining
> it. You state what happens _when_ the mark is "active", but not what
> a mark has to do or to be to acquire or to lose the essence of
> "active"ness.
Good point; I've changed this accordingly.
As for changing the "active mark" terminology, that's not particularly
profitable, because it's already deeply embedded in the C and Lisp code
for over a decade. (There are, of course, many other terminology
problems of this sort in Emacs.) The main thing that's important, I
think, is that the description of the "transient-mark-mode enabled"
behavior and the "transient-mark-mode disabled" behavior are each
internally consistent; they aren't always mutually consistent, but
that's too bad.
> In *scratch*, disable Transient Mark Mode, write the following line and
> put the region as indicated:
>
> one two threeee
> ^ ^
> | |
> point mark
>
> The mark is now active (since t-m-m is nil). Therefore the region is
> "active". Execute the command `ispell-word' with M-$; this is a command
> which supposedly works on the region when the region is "active". It
> fails to flag the non-word "threeee", suggesting that it regards the
> region as "inactive".
As described in the section about what happens when Transient Mark mode
is disabled:
Some commands, which ordinarily operate on the region when the mark is
active, instead act on the entire buffer. For instance, @kbd{C-x u}
normally reverses changes within the region if the mark is active;
when Transient Mark mode is off, it acts on the entire buffer.
However, you can type @kbd{C-u C-x u} to make it operate on the
region. @xref{Undo}. Other commands that act this way are identified
in their own documentation.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2009-05-28 20:48 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 33+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-05-28 12:29 Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-28 16:54 ` Chong Yidong
2009-05-28 20:15 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-28 20:48 ` Chong Yidong [this message]
2009-05-28 23:03 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-28 23:53 ` Davis Herring
2009-05-29 11:01 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-29 0:21 ` Chong Yidong
2009-05-29 1:55 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-05-29 4:30 ` Kevin Rodgers
2009-05-29 5:47 ` Andreas Roehler
2009-05-29 8:25 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2009-05-29 8:58 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-06-01 2:34 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2009-06-01 9:40 ` Lennart Borgman
2009-06-02 6:23 ` Andreas Roehler
2009-06-02 11:50 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2009-05-29 8:37 ` Eli Zaretskii
2009-05-29 9:27 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-29 10:11 ` Eli Zaretskii
2009-05-29 13:13 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-29 14:19 ` Stefan Monnier
2009-05-29 16:40 ` Drew Adams
2009-05-29 22:20 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-30 0:11 ` Drew Adams
2009-05-29 9:55 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2009-05-29 10:14 ` Eli Zaretskii
2009-06-01 2:09 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2009-05-29 10:45 ` Andreas Roehler
2009-05-29 8:38 ` Eli Zaretskii
2009-05-29 9:35 ` Alan Mackenzie
2009-05-29 9:48 ` Eli Zaretskii
2009-05-29 13:17 ` Alan Mackenzie
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