Re: Changes to emacs/lisp/progmodes/grep.el

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

>> BTW, as you can see below I also changed handling of `end-mk' in
>> `compilation-goto-locus'.  Currently it activates the region around a
>> matched string.  This is very inconvenient.  I changed this to put a
>> highlighted overlay on a matched string just as it does now for the
>> whole line.

> This was Stef's idea for users of transient-mark-mode.  It has the advantage
> of staying around longer, but your approach is more useful for everyone.

My original use of transient-mark-mode for such errors was for sml-mode.el
where the region specified by an error can span several screenfuls of text
(narrowing down such error reports to something more useful is actively
being worked on, but is still a research problem).  In such a case it is
very useful to be able to jump to each end of the region.
So using transient-mark-mode was just very natural and had the added
advantage of being extremely easy to code.

> (I suspect transient-mark-mode is not so popular, at least not with me.)

Seeing how much tmm-specific code has been written, I tend to believe
the opposite.  I suspect tmm is unpopular among Emacs veterans but I
also suspect that GUI-happy users have a hard time believing that it's not
enabled by default.


        Stefan