Re: Emacs Explorer?

[Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     (2) implemented in other text editors works like this:
>     Mark some text with the mouse.  Click on the selected text and drag it.
>
> How can we make that fit into Emacs?  It is inconsistent with the usual
> Emacs conventions for mouse clicks.

IMVHO, a slight deviation from the old behavior is not too terrible,
especially with the right kind of user feedback.  And if it is
possible to turn off the new behavior, then there is no problem at
all.

If the mouse pointer is over a marked region, then it could change to
a hand (or some other icon) to signify that dragging at that spot
would behave differently.  Hm.  But then, when the mouse button is
down, the mouse pointer would have to change again, I think.  That
might be confusing if other programs don't do it that way.

A second alternative would be to highlight the marked region in some
way when the mouse pointer is over it.  (Maybe by putting a border
around it?)  That might give a suitable hint that dragging at that
spot behaves differently.

But what do people think about the visual feedback while dragging
text?  In some editor (I forget which one) I once used I saw that the
text was continually updated to reflect the current paste position.
To illustrate what I mean by this, let uppercase characters indicate
the highlighted region.  Start with the following situation:

FOOabc

Now, drag the text with the mouse one character to the right (and do
NOT release the mouse button).  The display changes like so:

aFOObc

Dragging one more character changes it like this:

abFOOc

Then, after releasing the mouse button, I'm not sure if the
highlighting stays or whether it is removed.

For short highlighted text as in the above example, it might look
cute.  But I think this kind of visual feedback is not practical if
the highlighted text is longer than the window size.

Kai