Re: C-d deleting region considered harmful

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

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.

More scientifically, if you have an active region, then you can have
"modal" behavior: deletion operations can (implicitly) act on the
region instead of on specific text units, insertion operations can
(implicitly) substitute new text for the region, and so on.  Without
active regions, you can't have this kind of modal behavior.

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.