Re: line-move-visual

[Uday S Reddy <uDOTsDOTreddy@cs.bham.ac.uk>]

On 6/3/2010 11:11 PM, Mark Crispin wrote:

>
> I wasted hours trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my
> file, or my terminal emulator window, or my system. The fact that the
> problem went away on a different system added further confusion. It was
> only when I did ESC <n> CTRL/N and saw that it moved me the wrong number
> of lines, but only on one system, that I realized that emacs changed.
> And that's when I did ESC X describe-key CTRL/N and read about
> line-mode-visual, although it did not mention that this was now the
> default.
>
> Surprise. Grr.

Having used Emacs for some 30 years myself, I always expect a few surprises with a new major version of Emacs.  It takes me a few months to read through all the change logs and the new manual sections to become comfortable with all the new and changed features.  Our sys admins realize that it takes time to get up to speed with a new version of Emacs, and generally install the new version along side the old version.  They maintain the two for several months before removing the old version.  Sometimes when there are significant new features, the old version just stays, because several users are uncomfortable with the new version.   The good thing about free software is that you can do that!

I would say your ire should be directed at your downstream distributions which don't seem to understand what a version change means to users.  An Emacs major version upgrade should never be done as part of a "routine" update.  They should never be installing Emacs without the news file.  And, you can't assume that you can reliably use a new version without reading through the change log at least.

Reading through the emacs-developers list yesterday, I also discovered that there is an Options -> Customize -> New Options menu, which asks you for an old version number and lists all the new options that have been added since then.  That may be a good way to figure out what has changed.

---

As I said before, the line-move-visual setting has been a complex decision for the developers.  I have a virtual folder of "visual" messages from the emacs-developers list, which shows some 40+ threads over the last couple of years, with each one having been extremely contentious.  I am still trying to figure out what it all means.

It would help the rest of us if you could tell us what problem you ran into with the default setting of line-move-visual, and why it is important for what you do.

Cheers,
Uday