Re: line-move-visual

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

In comp.emacs Uday S Reddy <uDOTsDOTreddy@cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 6/15/2010 7:54 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:

> But I feel this discussion is tangential.  Most of us accept that
> visual line  movement is a /good/ idea and we find it useful in lots of
> contexts.  We are  grateful for Stefan & co for thinking of it and
> implementing it.

> The question is really whether it should have been made the default.

Yes.  That is a very difficult question.  Most contentious issues
discussed on the developers' list are about changing defaults.  This was
one of these.

> Every time I narrowed down to that issue in this thread, the
> participants have  fallen silent (first Xah Lee then Tim Cross, Alan
> Mackenzie and Stefan  himself).  I guess there is no good answer to it.

Ooh, talk about trolling!  ;-)  I have "fallen silent" because I've
nothing much fresh to say.

> There is no need for us to beat a dead horse.  If the developers accept
> that it  is a bad idea to introduce backward-incompatible changes for
> flimsy reasons,  Emacs will be a more useful system for all of us than
> it currently is.

Normally I'd find myself arguing strongly in the camp of the
"traditionalists" when fighting over a change in defaults.  For this
particular change, I'm ambivalent.  The hassle with directly editing long
lines is, I believe, more painful than that of navigating keyboard macros
through them.  Somebody had to decide this issue, and that somebody was
Stefan.  I think, on balance, he made the right choice.  I wouldn't have
been complaining if he had decided the opposite.

> Fortunately, nothing major is going to fall apart as a result of
> `next-line'  changing its meaning.  But I hope that we can arrest this
> trend right here so  that we don't have to put up with more pain in
> future.

"Trend"?  You are getting polemic!  Emacs will continue to evolve
steadily, and some of the changes will cause you minor pain, as they will
me.  You're surely used to tweaking your .emacs on every major release,
so what's new?

> Cheers,
> Uday

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).