Re: line-move-visual

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

On 6/15/2010 10:20 AM, Tim X wrote:

> I still don't understand the question you referred to when you wrote
>
> "When I asked "do you want C-n to move by logical line or visual line in
> the logical line mode", the gallery has been silent."
>
> Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by logical line mode. My
> interpretation was that logical line mode referred to what some would
> call the 'traditional' default mode that emacs had until v23 i.e. C-n and Cp
> moved to the next and previous lines where a line would be defined by
> standard eol characters.

By "logical line mode," I meant the state of Emacs whenever visual-line-mode is 
nil.  When you fire up Emacs with 'emacs -Q', it is in this mode.  This is not 
standard terminology.  It is something I made up to describe the situation we 
expect to have when Emacs is not in visual-line-mode.

By your terminology, "logical line mode" existed in Emacs 22, but it doesn't 
exist in Emacs 23.  When you fire up 'emacs -Q' you get some kind of an "emacs 
default mode with a funny mixture of logical and visual lines".  From this 
point of view, the problem is more simply stated: the Emacs default is not 
logical line mode any more.

> So, I still don't understand your question and I suspect I'm not alone.
> This could explain the lack of response to your question and provides an
> alternative to your rather negative and somewhat arrogant assertion
> regarding an 'ill informed gallery'. A failure to illicit a response to
> a question can easily be due to the way it is presented and does not in
> itself tell you anything about the audience.

Sorry, arrogance was not my intent.  The reason for calling the people that 
gave positive feedback "ill informed" is that either they don't realize that 
they can get the behavior they want by setting line-move-visual to t or they 
don't understand that things can break in unforeseen ways by changing the 
default behavior.  I was myself "ill informed" in this sense until this thread 
started.  So, if I happened to give positive feedback on this issue, it would 
have been worth nothing.

> To again make my position clear. I believe that setting line-move-visual
> to t by default was a mistake. I believe the introduction of the ability
> to change the semantics of line movement is a good addition, despite some
> of the negative consequences and the fact that I think there is still
> some work to be done to handle things like macros in a reliable
> consistent manner. This ability to change the movement semantics has
> enabled improved support for a number of activities, many of which have
> been mentioned elsewhere in this thread. I agree that its introduction
> does come with some pain, but I think its worth it. From a theoretical
> basis, I can see where some of the concerns are coming from, but I've
> yet to hear of an actual example where the change has caused the
> cataclysmic disasters that have been predicted. I think despite some
> valid points, things have been over stated.

I think we agree on all of this.  However, I don't think I predicted 
"cataclysmic disasters".  I only said that file corruption is possible. 
Whether it actually happens or not depends on how much code or macro collection 
is out there in circulation which uses `next-line'.  As a developer, I avoid 
the possibility of file corruption at all cost.  I don't expect myself to be 
proved or disproved about cataclysmic disasters.

Perhaps my more important point is that, if we intend for Emacs to continue as 
a dependable system component (as opposed to a personal text editor), these 
kinds of incompatible changes should not be made.

> Which brings me to my final issue and the one that actually dragged me
> into this thread. The arrogance, derogatory comments about the emacs
> maintainers, sweeping generalizations and assumptions regarding
> everything from their personal motivations, experience, egos and even
> age has been quite outrageous. Arrogant claims of teaching them lessons
> and demands for more accountability etc have been over the top and all
> of this due essentially to one poor decision to change the default
> behavior. There has been no recognition for all the recent improvements
> in font handling, support for GTK, dbus, etc, X window support
> enhancements, emacsclient improvements, improved and extended support
> for different character encodings, support for larger buffers and much
> more. I'm quite amazed at the development and improvements we have been
> seeing. Remember how slow it was to go from emacs 20 to 21? Remember the
> constant frustrations of an emacs that frequently ran into limitations
> that other systems didn't experience? I think the work that has been
> done over the last few years has been quite remarkable.

On this, we disagree.  To set the record straight, neither I nor anybody else 
has used the phrase "teaching them a lesson" which has a very different 
meaning.  I have talked about taking a lesson, which is something smart people 
do throughout their lives, by learning from experience and users' feedback. 
Nothing derogatory was intended here.  Anybody who thinks that they don't need 
a lesson every now and then are probably arrogant themselves!

I haven't made any comments on Mark Crispin's language or etiquette.  Neither 
have I made such comments about anybody else.  My feeling is that it is a waste 
of time to talk about etiquette on newsgroups.  We are all adults and we are 
not going to change our behaviour patterns just because somebody commented on 
it in a newsgroup.  It is much more productive to focus on the substance and 
the issues, and try to figure out what is being talked about rather than how it 
is talked about.

If you want to acclaim the great progress being made in Emacs, please by all 
means start a thread and we will all join in.  But you can't fault us for not 
doing it in this thread which has a particular purpose, to discuss 
line-move-visual.

---

I wrote my last message to essentially sum up the discussion of this thread, 
which has been rather long by all standards.  I don't intend to prolong it 
further unless anybody comes up with some reasons for why the current default 
setting was good idea.

Cheers,
Uday