Re: line-move-visual

[Mark Crispin <mrc@panda.com>]

On Sat, 12 Jun 2010, Wojciech Meyer posted:
> Well it is certainly possible, one can use mailing list and the NEWS
> file, which was suggested before.

Please read the first chapter of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to 
understand the flaw in that reasoning.

>> This sort of thing happened in the past as well.  The difference was
>> that there was accountability in the past that is absent today.
> What sort of acountability, I think unhappy `customers' is enough
> punishment.

Apparently not, if the "customers" are told that it's their fault for not 
being on the development list.

> What kind of Emacs users are they? Isn't possible to place on every
> machine a stub containing: (setq line-move-visual nil).

There include people who never use emacs, except to follow the procedure 
that I outline (which is literally a cookbook "do these steps exactly"). 
I have no control or access to the machines in question.

Perhaps I should have written a program to begin with.  But it was so much 
simpler to leverage upon emacs back in the days when emacs had a reliable 
interface.  Now that it no longer does, I'm now forced to write the 
program.

> There is nothing wrong in being young and creative, that makes often
> things better. Young people often do care more about things then Senior
> Architects, they are also more flexible for changes.

Yes, but they lack the wisdom and experience of their elders.  This in 
turn leads them to address complex problems with simple solutions that 
backfire (sometimes disastrously).

> The reason why this setting wasn't kept by default is to fix the
> fundamental problem,

Yeah, right.  The "fundamental problem" that CTRL/A, CTRL/E, CTRL/N, 
CTRL/P, etc. moved to predictable places in the file no matter what the 
screen width, and thus could be relied upon for a cookbook procedure.

We can't have predictability and reliability.  We have to do pretty-pretty 
to be just like Word, and destroy the one attribute that made emacs 
superior to other choices.

Bletch.

This wouldn't have been a problem had the arrow keys been changed to the 
new semantics and CTRL-A/E/N/P been left alone.  The new semantics are 
even arguably right for arrow keys (although I would go further and say 
that they should also treat tabs as the equivalent number of spaces).  It 
isn't as if we're still in the 1970s and have keyboards without arrow 
keys.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.