bug#14693: 24.3.50; Undoing yank-pop

[Michael Heerdegen]

Hello,

also see the recent short thread with same subject in emacs-dev.

The problem: Users often do

  C-y M-y M-y ...

If you got lost, didn't find what you had searched, or want to start
anew, undo behaves not very practical.  Hitting C-_ successively undoes
every single M-y step - which is IMHO not very useful, because you
already skipped all these yanks.  And you don't know when to stop: there
is no indication when you cross the border and undo changes before the
initial yank.  Yes, there is redo, but you have to pay attention and
read the screen content all the time, which is inconvenient.

I see two possibilities:

(1) Let undo revert until the initial yank in one step.  This is what I
prefer, however, there are people who like the current behavior.  We
could let the user decide and make it customizable.

(2) A minimal but still quite satisfying change: currently, `yank-pop'
with a zero prefix arg is a no-op (at least when I tried it).  We could
make it undo until the initial yank.  The code change would be around
one line, and it would make some sense (0 -> nullify whatever had been
yanked).


Regards,

Michael.



In GNU Emacs 24.3.50.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.8.2)
 of 2013-06-18 on dex, modified by Debian
 (emacs-snapshot package, version 2:20130618-1)
Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11204000
System Description:     Debian GNU/Linux testing (jessie)