RE: [PATCH] Proposal to change cursor appearance to indicate region activation

[Kelly Dean <kelly@prtime.org>]

Drew Adams wrote:
> Are you trying to find a good way to let users opt out of automatic cursor
> changing for particular buffers, i.e., disable the global nature of the
> mode for some buffers?

I already found the right way before I even sent my patch. It's setq-local on a defcustom, and a pair of one-line additions to de/activate-mark that are simply predicated on that variable. It couldn't possibly be any simpler.

I just unwisely added a ⌜-mode⌝ suffix to the variable's name, and made the functional mistake of setting it to t by default. I should have followed your advice about the default. ;-)

> If so, is that really an important feature?
>
> I would think that needing to turn off the mode for a particular buffer
> would be pretty rare,

I have a couple buffer-local minor modes that need to do it, and I routinely have those modes active in some buffers but not in others.

> and could be accommodated just by toggling the
> (global) mode temporarily when in such a buffer.

That won't work, since my modes that need to turn off dynamic-cursor need to remain active (buffer-locally) even when I switch to another buffer, and dynamic-cursor should remain active in that other buffer.

Even if there were no need to enable/disable it buffer-locally, my original patch is still the simplest implementation. Just drop the ⌜-mode⌝ suffix and change the default to nil.