Re: line-move-visual

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

Stefan Monnier wrote:

> Choosing defaults is very difficult indeed.  You can never please
> everyone.  In this specific case, I'm the main guy to blame: I wrote the
> original patch for line-move-visual (oddly enough, since it touches
> parts of the code I still am not at all familiar with), mostly because
> it seemed it would be important for proper support of word-wrap (which
> I didn't care for much, but many users cared about it).

Isn't word-wrap the ideal solution for dealing with the single-line paragraphs 
that you mention in the second bullet point below?

> 
> Yes, it occasionally doesn't do what I want, but in practice, it does
> what I want more often than the previous case:
> - when no line wraps, it either makes no difference, or it works
>   slightly better because it correctly accounts for
>   variable-pitch fonts.
> - when lines are long (typically the "single-line paragraph" text coming
>   from people who either use word-wrap or longlines-mode or an editor
>   that behaves similarly, but can also happen in many other cases like
>   binary files, or mechanically-generated files), the new behavior is
>   much better (how did you move to "that spot I see about 10
>   visual-lines down from point" in a single logical line in
>   previous Emacsen?).
> - when the buffer mostly fits without wrapping, except for a few
>   exceptions, then yes, the new behavior is less good for those
>   wrapped-lines.  In my particular case, such lines are usually (very
>   minor) bugs anyway, so it's not that important, but I understand that
>   some people get annoyed.  And of course, if you use C-100 C-n instead
>   of M-g M-g 100 RET to move to the line 100 (I personally use C-s 100
>   instead ;-), you'll be disappointed, and if you use keyboard macros
>   you'll also be disappointed.
> 
> Depending on your particular circumstances, the second case will only
> rarely happen whereas the third will be very common, so you'll be
> really annoyed.  Sorry about that.  Please (setq line-move-visual nil)
> in your .emacs and/or try to come up with some idea how we could keep
> the advantages in cases 1 and 2 without suffering in case 3.

If line-move-visual is nil by default, the users that care about 1 and 2 can 
set it to t, can't they?  It is the same issue from the other side of the 
fence.  They don't need the default set in a particular way to get their behaviour.

Moreover, the people dealing with single-line paragraphs (me being one of them) 
will normally use visual-line-mode, which does visual line motion anyway.  So, 
they are not affected by the default at all.

So, this particular decision doesn't seem to be all that difficult.

Cheers,
Uday