Re: Suggestion: Mapping of M-g should be goto-line

[Jari Aalto+mail.linux]

* Thu 2004-03-25 Danilo Segan <dsegan <AT> gmx.net> mail.default.spool
| Today at 7:11, Jari Aalto wrote:
| 
| >         If put side by side, "set face default" and goto-line, I would
| >         estimate that the 99 % of the cases, there is more need for
| >         goto-line. Therefore it would be better if the M-g was mapped
| >         to it. 
| 
| Emacs tries hard to make goto-line unnecessary, AFAICT.  Can you
| provide an example of when goto-line couldn't be replaced with a
| better functionality (such as using M-x next-error)? 

Only if user knows Emacs. He doesn't when he is a beginner. And even
long period of Emacs experience, people still run many, many programs
outside of emacs in their terminals.

I have 20-40 terminals open to run and monitor various
tasks. Including command 'grep' and I use it with -n to get line numbers.

It's different to have 20 terminals open in all correct directory
locations when you have wealth of bash scripts and aliases
available. Switching to Emacs to typing M-x grep + long directory names,
which I might write wrong is not what people want to do. They might, but
the terminal usually wins (think about readline macros that can be used to
manipulate string input from previous commands)-

Emacs is no substitute for all system tasks. It is a great companion,
but I believe only handful of people do _all_ from inside Emacs and
not ever open a single terminal.

So, line numbers come from everywhere. You might be running 3-5 server
screen, shared samba mounts, then you see error in next screen and want
to view it in Emacs that contains the log file or configuration file ...
the needs are many.
 
| >         Users need line information. After all, Emacs for most, is
| >         programming language development environment: C / C++, Python,
| >         Perl, Ruby etc. In time they may find and start use other
| >         features like Gnus, Mail and others.
| 
| Exactly, and that's why the next-error and friends are so useful — I
| need not worry about typing the exact line number, because I do not
| care about the exact line number.  I care about the place with
| certain code/error/whatever, and that's where I want to go.  Emacs
| has the context available, so better make use of it.
| 
| FWIW, C-x ` is bound to next-error, and it's a big win in situations
| like this.

Please remember that Emacs can't do for every programming language.
PHP displays errors in Web page, but your code is in Emacs.

        ... and you would need M-g (goto-line) all the time.

Other Web-based programming languages reports problems in the page,
not to Emacs.

| >         The "de facto" situation for long has been that everybody maps
| >         M-g to goto-line. People advice that in newsgroups, because it
| >         is indeed the most logical key.
| >
| >         If we would take a poll in Emacs newsgroups, presumably the
| >         "yes" votes for goto-line would win in great majority.
| 
| Perhaps, but that doesn't mean that it's a right thing to do.  
| I seldom use current M-g binding as well, but not less than M-x
| goto-line. 

The right thing for M-g is exactly that. To move it to a sensible
function, and goto-line has been it for more years than I can
remember.

Let's think about the "average joe" how he would see it.

Jari

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