Re: Speed of keyboard macro execution?

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:

> If it isn't made the default, I think it is fairly harmless to have
> a variable you could set to trigger David's proposed behavior. I
> doubt many people are going to use it, but if they do, they've
> explicitly chosen they want it, and it isn't in general our business
> to tell people how they should enjoy editing. Emacs is a highly
> programmable system, and if this the (non-default!) behavior is what
> someone wants, well, adding it means that people don't have to write
> the hack to do it on their own.
>
> That said, the default has to follow the principle of least surprise I
> think.

We wouldn't have Emacs under that premise.  Joking aside I'm not that
sure that there will be a lot of surprise involved here since the whole
point of line-move-visual is to operate under visual feedback so people
will tend to move as far as necessary.

There also is the possibility of a have-one's-cake-and-eat-it-too
approach: when possible macro recording omits any "purely visual"
movements and replaces the recorded sequences with equivalents that
don't move visually.

It would be my guess that this would likely match naive expectations
_better_ than straightforward recording/playback.  However, it would be
underhanded of the "I'll do what you want instead of what you say" kind.
Switching off visual movement explicitly during recording/replay seems
less sketchy in comparison.

-- 
David Kastrup