Re: C-d deleting region considered harmful

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:

> Christoph writes:
>  > On 9/18/2010 3:18 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>  > 
>  > >> So I just switched off `transient-mark-mode', which is something
>  > >> I suspect most Emacs old-timers will be more comfortable with.
>  > >
>  > > Here's one such old-timer.
>  > Out of curiosity, from old-timer to new-timer, what advantages does
>  > the traditional Emacs behavior over transient-mark-mode?
>
> Mostly, it's traditional and old-timers are used to it.  It took me
> close to a month to get used to the various differences, then I
> decided I liked t-m-m (actually, zmacs-regions) better on than off.

That is to be taken with a heavy grain of salt since historically
zmacs-regions and transient-mark-mode have had a number of small
differences.  Enough that some people moving back and forth used
zmacs-regions on XEmacs, but scorned transient-mark-mode on Emacs as
being unusable.

Now the latter has been in constant flux over the last versions.  I
don't know how they compare in user acceptance and semantics in the
current state.

And I don't know whether there are any Double Power Users left who could
give qualified comparisons.

> The two styles are *equally* powerful.  Some people like the modal,
> DWIMmish, behavior better (it can be slightly more efficient in terms
> of keystroke count), while others like the non-modal, DWIS ("do what I
> say"), behavior better (it's better adapted to creating personal
> idioms and using "muscle memory", I think).  Much of the taste
> difference can be attributed to "what you are used to", of course, and
> I think that the strongest reasons for preferring one to the other are
> what you are used to as "traditional" for you.

I don't think that this really applies all too much for
transient-mark-mode: the complaints do not center around user interface
philosophies, but rather the nitty gritty details.

In short: figuring out for each choice the least annoying details of
operation.

Not having transient regions as sideeffects of other useful operations
at all, of course, is reasonably simple to implement.

There are not really many commands left where the setting of
transient-mark-mode should make a difference, or even a bad surprise.  I
can think of C-SPC, C-x C-x, M-< and M-> and that's more or less it.
Then there are the mark-something commands (I have my doubts they are
used very much) where the transient-region behavior would seem somewhat
less contentious.

-- 
David Kastrup