Re: Why mouse-1/2/3 ?

["Clément Pit-Claudel" <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>]

On 27/04/2020 07.31, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 11:23:47AM +0000, ndame wrote:
>>> Like a friend of mine said the other day: "why do the people have
>>> to speak constantly English and don't speak German, as everyone
>>> else does?" :-)
>> 
>> Yep. It's like saying Emacs doesn't need to adapt, if someone wants
>> to use it then learn the emacs terminology.
> 
> If you want Emacs to adapt in this point, it's on you to convince
> Emacs people that this change is important.

FWIW, I don't find the comparison to speaking German very convincing either.

> You haven't managed to convince me, at least (I'm not an important
> "Emacs people", just a happy user, mind you). Mentioning the
> alternative spellings in the documentation and in the help, yes, by
> all means.

Neither have you managed to convince me that mouse-1-2-3 is valuable.  I've seen one moderately convincing point about this relating to left-handed mice (suggesting that buttons should really be called inner, middle, and outer), but I haven't seen much of an argument in support of 1, 2, 3 except "that's how Emacs does it.

FWIW, I've been using Emacs for 10 years, with 7 years spent almost exclusively inside of it, and I don't find mouse-1-2-3 natural.  Given how uncommonly I use the middle and right mouse buttons in Emacs, it actually took me years to remember whether mouse-2 was the right mouse button or the middle one (it didn't help that one of my mice didn't have a scrollwheel, so counting the buttons left to right gave the wrong intuition, IIRC).

> But changing the names in the code... not for me, at least.

Concretely, what does changing the names in the code mean?  Changing the docstrings?  Or changing the spelling in keymaps?