Re: Enabling Transient Mark Mode by default

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

On 20 Feb 2008, at 16:04, Juanma Barranquero wrote:

> Of course. But an experienced user does not *need* for Emacs to agree
> with other apps he uses: he can customize it. The trouble is
> unexperienced users who find themselves with (to them) weird or
> unexpected behavior, and no way to fix it. We can give them familiar
> defaults, or we can send them to RTFM...


Absolutely. Despite some 15-20 years experience with computers, I had  
no Emacs and no Lisp experience. So I gave up twice until I decided to  
bite the bullet and switch to the only editor with Prolog support. It  
took me many weeks to customize it to the behavior I was used to from  
all my other apps. And even four years later I find myself going nuts  
over some things, except that I know now why they're hard to implement.

By the way, I found empirically that some 80 percent of all users  
(exact figure eludes me now) left the Aquamacs default of opening new  
buffers in separate frames turned on. They're happy with it and get on  
with their lives. Of course there's a few others, old-time Emacs  
users, who don't find the big fat menu option in "Options" to turn  
this off, and instead bitch about it on their blogs. But I tend to  
look at what the majority wants, even if it might not be the best  
solution when ignoring the user's environment (other apps!). That's  
why we've got these things switched on. Including variable-width fonts  
for all text modes.

I've never understood what hinders people from providing an "Emacs"  
and an "Emacs Classic", which simply differ in their default  
configuration. (But I also don't really care any more.)