Re: A wish, a plea

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    But so what?  Why should that affect UI decisions?  A Lisp Interaction
    buffer that doesn't even prompt to save on exit is a pointless default
    for the vast majority of Emacs's users.  Putting that message in it
    doesn't make it any more useful, it just allows us to transfer blame.

I agree with that approach to the issue.

The reason for the note in *scratch* is to help users avoid lossage.
It isn't meant as a way for us to escape blame.  This isn't a question
of blame anyway.  The question is how to make Emacs better for users.

Some users do use *scratch* as intended, so we should not get rid of it.

We can't get rid of the problem by changing the initial buffer.  Emacs
normally starts up with no files visited, and it has to have some
current buffer.  Whatever that buffer is, it will raise the same issue.

So I think we should do these things:

1. Arrange to set buffer-offer-save to t in *scratch*
if it is ever changed.

2. Turn on auto-saving for it.  (Just how Emacs should check for an
auto-save file for *scratch* could take some fine tuning.)

3. Maybe also start it out read-only.

4. Maybe also pop up a warning if the user types more than 500
self-inserting characters in *scratch* without ever doing Lisp
evaluation.