Re: A wish, a plea

[Sascha Wilde <wilde@sha-bang.de>]

Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com> wrote:

> Hacksaw <hacksaw@hacksaw.org> writes:
>> So I started writing, and I wrote for quite a while, it was really
>> flowing well, and I thought, hey, I should save, because I don't want
>> to lose this, but in my reverie, I hit the ^X^C first.
[...]
>> But I wasn't in programming mode, so I was in scratch, and lost
>> everything I was writing, because scratch isn't backed up by anything.
>
> I agree, this should be changed.

FWIW I object.

I'm actually using *scratch* quite often, as a scratch pad for stuff I
don't want to save (and don't want to be asked, if I want to save them
on exit), as well as for ad-hoc elisp stuff.

I like the feature of having *scratch* at hand from the beginning in
every emacs session, and I would miss it...

[...]
>    - It's true that "*scratch*" today opens with this message in it:
>
>        ;; This buffer is for notes you don't want to save, and for
>        ;; Lisp evaluation.  If you want to create a file, visit that
>        ;; file with C-x C-f, then enter the text in that file's own
>        ;; buffer.

Yes, and this makes absolutely clear what to expect from the *scratch*
buffer -- in fact, for content you actually want to keep you will have
to delete this text first, so don't whine when you ignored it.

>      But users don't read stuff, we all know that (heck, I'm a user
>      who's also a programmer, and I still don't read stuff).

Yeah, there is much truth in that, and I often fail to read stuff my
self -- but if something goes wrong I don't blame others for my fault.
Especially if the text in question is so short, clear and easy to
notice as this comments in the *scratch* buffer. 

>      I think
>      of that notice as a workaround to a real solution: offering to
>      save what the user has typed.

No "real solution" needed, as *scratch* does exactly what it is
intended to, and it states it's intention loud and clearly.

Please leave *scratch* alone.

cheers
sascha
-- 
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web 
page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had 
very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another 
word processor, or another network." -- Tim Berners-Lee, July 1996