Re: line-move-visual

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> The thinking behind the line-move-visual decision went something like
> this.  If C-n moves by logical lines then the new users would be
> confused.  If it moves by visual lines then the experienced users would
> be bothered.  But we have a flag whereby experienced users can revert to
> the old behavior.  The new users won't know enough to set a flag.  So,
> let us go with the default that helps out the new users.  See this
> thread for example:

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).

After writing the patch, I tried it out, mostly for debugging purposes,
and much to my surprise I discovered that I actually liked it.

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.


        Stefan