Fwd: Keeping up; was Another Emacs incompatibility

Fwd: Keeping up; was Another Emacs incompatibility

[Francis Belliveau]

I accidentally sent this to Eli when I meant to send it to the list.
Sorry for the double-tap Eli.

Here I am rolling back the conversation a bit with a response to two good posts at the bottom.

Stefan is correct, every change will cause somebody to be unhappy.

My biggest problem is with the rate that I move from one version to the next.  I remember emacs 19 causing all kinds of problem with my customizations.  I still have an e19hacks.el file in use.
I usually upgrade only every 3 or 4 major revisions at as time.  It is difficult to keep up with what needs to be done to fix all the problems.  I am still having a lot of problems with 26.1, but I am sure that some of the annoyances could be OS related.  This new replace-region is a problem, but I have adapted by making sure that I move the cursor after placing the mark.  Highlighted region is another. I just use ^g to work around it

Eli says that things are always announced in NEWS.  I never heard of that so now I need to read everything since 23.x to figure out what to turn off and how to repair all the automated indenting back to my liking.

I have not yet asked any questions, after months of use, because I have yet to find the time to dig into the documentation regarding how all this is supposed to work.  I never did fix Java the way I wanted it in 23.x and now C and C++ are working differently.
Is this frustrating? YES.
Whose fault is it? Mostly my own for not keeping up.


Now let me ask a question that I have trouble with for a long time.  My customizations turn off the menus and tool-bars because they take up valuable screen-space and I hate leaving the keyboard to use them.
However, I often end up on a machine where my custom stuff does not exist and accidentally change the focus within emacs to a menu while moving focus between windows.
How do I get emacs to focus back on the buffer so that I can go back to typing?I generally fight my way out of the problem, but I have yet to find a magic combination that I can remember to use next time

Fran


> 
>> On Aug 17, 2020, at 12:08, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Emacs doesn't change such basic traits of its usage, either.  We
>> haven't changed the command-line options, didn't change the documented
>> APIs of Emacs primitives in incompatible ways, and '+' still adds,
>> doesn't subtract.  However, Emacs has several orders of magnitude more
>> features as aspects than the likes of cp and mv, and as time passes
>> and the Emacs audience changes, the popular demand for some of them
>> also changes.
>> 
>> In any case, whenever a backward-incompatible change happens, there's
>> usually a way, called out in NEWS, to get back old behavior.
>> 
> 
>> On Aug 17, 2020, at 16:42, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> 
>> For any change to Emacs (new feature, change to defaults, bug fix, you
>> name it), one can easily come up with some scenario where the change
>> results in an undesired result [ the credibility/likelihood of the
>> scenario may vary widely, of course ].  So the only really safe way to
>> avoid introducing new problems is to leave the code 100% unchanged.

Re: Fwd: Keeping up; was Another Emacs incompatibility

[Óscar Fuentes]

Francis Belliveau <f.belliveau@comcast.net> writes:

> Now let me ask a question that I have trouble with for a long time. My
> customizations turn off the menus and tool-bars because they take up
> valuable screen-space and I hate leaving the keyboard to use them.
> However, I often end up on a machine where my custom stuff does not
> exist and accidentally change the focus within emacs to a menu while
> moving focus between windows. How do I get emacs to focus back on the
> buffer so that I can go back to typing?I generally fight my way out of
> the problem, but I have yet to find a magic combination that I can
> remember to use next time

If the menu is Emacs' menu, C-g should do the trick.

Re: Keeping up; was Another Emacs incompatibility

[Francis Belliveau]

Seems to me that was the first thing that I tried.  
Unfortunately, the OS is in charge at that point and it is looking for a GUI feature triggered by C-g rather than passing it inside.
Once the GUI level of the OS, usually Linux via ssh in my case, things seem to get stuck in some mode where only a mouse-click will fix the problem. Actually that means at least two layers of OS in are in the mix. I end up trying innocuous things like minimize, clicking inside the region,  etc.  I eventually wake things up.  Maybe C-g after clicking inside the region will work.

The next time this happens I will try and not the entire sequence I used to eventually untangle myself.  It happens seldom enough now that I am working mostly remotely, since I encounter fewer machines that do not have my customizations installed.


> On Aug 23, 2020, at 17:27, Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> wrote:
> 
> Francis Belliveau <f.belliveau@comcast.net> writes:
> 
>> Now let me ask a question that I have trouble with for a long time. My
>> customizations turn off the menus and tool-bars because they take up
>> valuable screen-space and I hate leaving the keyboard to use them.
>> However, I often end up on a machine where my custom stuff does not
>> exist and accidentally change the focus within emacs to a menu while
>> moving focus between windows. How do I get emacs to focus back on the
>> buffer so that I can go back to typing?I generally fight my way out of
>> the problem, but I have yet to find a magic combination that I can
>> remember to use next time
> 
> If the menu is Emacs' menu, C-g should do the trick.

Re: Keeping up; was Another Emacs incompatibility

[Nick Dokos]

Francis Belliveau <f.belliveau@comcast.net> writes:

> Seems to me that was the first thing that I tried.  
> Unfortunately, the OS is in charge at that point and it is looking for a GUI feature triggered by C-g rather than passing it inside.
> Once the GUI level of the OS, usually Linux via ssh in my case, things
> seem to get stuck in some mode where only a mouse-click will fix the
> problem. Actually that means at least two layers of OS in are in the
> mix. I end up trying innocuous things like minimize, clicking inside
> the region, etc.  I eventually wake things up.  Maybe C-g after
> clicking inside the region will work.
>

Have you tried hitting ESC while the cursor is in the menu? That seems
to work "often" IME.

> The next time this happens I will try and not the entire sequence I
> used to eventually untangle myself.  It happens seldom enough now that
> I am working mostly remotely, since I encounter fewer machines that do
> not have my customizations installed.
>
>
>> On Aug 23, 2020, at 17:27, Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> wrote:
>> 
>> Francis Belliveau <f.belliveau@comcast.net> writes:
>> 
>>> Now let me ask a question that I have trouble with for a long time. My
>>> customizations turn off the menus and tool-bars because they take up
>>> valuable screen-space and I hate leaving the keyboard to use them.
>>> However, I often end up on a machine where my custom stuff does not
>>> exist and accidentally change the focus within emacs to a menu while
>>> moving focus between windows. How do I get emacs to focus back on the
>>> buffer so that I can go back to typing?I generally fight my way out of
>>> the problem, but I have yet to find a magic combination that I can
>>> remember to use next time
>> 
>> If the menu is Emacs' menu, C-g should do the trick.
>
>
>

-- 
Nick

"There are only two hard problems in computer science: cache
invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." -Martin Fowler