Re: Suggested experimental test

[Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>]

* Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> [2021-03-22 01:18]:
> C-o is not at all "hitting the trash can", at the moment there is nothing
> more than a proposal to conduct an experiment to make a (small?) change to
> its meaning.

I hope you started keeping notes of number of those who agree and
those who disagree, did you? In my opinion the experiment started by
introducing it. Some disagreer could read in the patch what is going
on, and there is no need for it to be experimented, as the
disagreement is already there due to high usage of C-o personally. But
I can understand that your experiment comes from a different view
point, I can bet you do not use C-o as much as I do, you probably
never use it, am I right?

Me I learned about it long time ago, and I use it in every Emacs-like
editor. Did you hear of zile-on-guile editor? There is also Emacs that
runs on Guile, there is mg, e3em, zile, those are most common that I
use, but I may sometimes use 

> C-o was described as follows in the 1985 Emacs manual: "When you want to
> insert a new line of text before an existing line, you can do it by typing
> the new line of text, followed by RET.  However, it may be easier to see
> what you are doing if you first make a blank line and then insert the
> desired text into it.  This is easy to do using the key C-o, which inserts a
> newline after point but leaves point in front of the newline.  After C-o,
> type the text for the new line. C-o F O O has the same effect as F O O RET,
> except for the final location of point."  It seems clear that C-o was
> thought as a convenience command, not as an essential editing
> command.

I do understand the above.

Because cursor is often located at the beginning of the line, C-o
opens up new line and allows me to basically insert new line of
text. The behavior described in this paragraph is somewhat different
than the behavior described in the above paragraph from 1985. It is
inserting a new line in this specific example, do you see? 

Another personal usage of C-o is whe cursor is located somewhere on
the line, but not at beginning of the line, then C-a C-o is what I
mostly use. That is how I insert new line above the current one with
cursor in such position. You can see that this behavior in this
paragraph is definitely not the same as the behavior described in 1985
manual, but also not same as behavior in the previous paragraph.

I could be doing instead C-a RET C-p or C-a RET ARROW-UP -- and I am
kind of thankful for C-a C-o sequence as that is what I use so often.

At this point I would like to know, how do you insert new line? Do you
insert them at all?

124 -- ONE LINE --
345 -- LAST LINE --
       ^
When your cursor is on the letter L in the second line above, what do
you do to insert one line there?

When your cursor is on the number 3 on last line, what do you do to
insert new line?

Both questions are beyond the behavior as described in the 1985 manual
that you assume to be the default and not usable behavior today. This
analysis is also part of your experiment, and I am genuinely
interested how people insert new line above the current line. I use
C-o or C-a C-o combination when cursor is not at beginning of the
line. 

> Emacs evolves very conservatively, and if at some point it becomes clear
> that some key binding is not useful for 99.9% of its users, there is no
> reason to keep it as is just because 40 years ago, under very different
> circumstances, it was considered convenient or useful.

If you have a list of number of people agreeing and disagreeing, then
you can make one true mathematical percentage as result. As now you
presented some information and then also your opinion that somehow
relates 99.9% to C-o not being useful, but opinions should not be
biased, as if you do the experiment, count the number of people
agreeing or disagreeing. Also explain how you insert new lines, and if
you insert them at all. Give some reasoning.

In vi and vim editors I use often O to insert new line, it is little
easier than C-o as it works with cursor being anywhere on the
line. The point is, I do insert empty lines all the time, every single
day, every hour.

> I'd say that Emacs is a bit like the C programming language, which
> evolves as conservatively as (or perhaps even more conservatively
> than) Emacs.  Just because a function was considered useful and was
> included in the standard library 30 years ago does not mean that it
> should forever remain in the standard library.

Yes, I do agree on that, but you are relating that statement which is
opinion to experiment, which was supposed to be some observable
countable fact, and experiment would not even involve casual Emacs
users, only those people reading this mailing list. It could not be
really complete without getting feedback from many other users.

How do you insert new lines? 

Jean