Underscores and word commands

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA>]

> My "instincts" have long been to interpret "word" as "identifier or keyword"

That's OK.

> in programming modes, to the point of customizing the syntax tables at
> startup to make "_" a word component.  Not for regular expressions, but for

While you're free to do it in your .emacs of course, it's not a good
solution when it makes its way into a package's source code because it
then imposes this conflation of the two concepts on every user (they
can't easily fix it in their .emacs).

C-M-SPC, C-M-f, and C-M-b already jump over symbols in many of the
relevant cases, but we should probably offer, along the lines of
subword-mode, a new minor mode that makes word commands operate on
symbols rather than just words (without messing with syntax tables,
since that can have much further reaching consequences).


        Stefan