Re: enriched-mode and switching major modes.

[Richard Stallman]

    True, the current implementation allows future derivatives of
    text-mode -- such as a major mode to write movie scripts -- to add
    persistent colors to the text.

It also allows existing simple variants of text mode, such as
paragraph-indent-text-mode, to work with enriched mode.

    But how often is this power used?

Enriched mode is not used much, now.  Part of the reason is that we
don't have code to save in the formats users really use, and part is
that we have not implemented enough of the display formatting features
that people want in a word processor.  This is an unfinished feature.

But does the lack of usage really make a difference here?

                                       And
    at what cost does this power come?

I don't see the point here.  What do you think the cost is?
At present, what we see a bug.  I admit that the bug is not
trivial to fix, but I don't see that the "power" of enriched
mode has a "cost" in some inherent sense.

      Even if we wanted this power,
    wouldn't it be better if such modes could just add some defun to a
    hook or two that would automatically do the right thing: Automatically
    encode and decode text properties upon saving and reading files.
    Without all the other features of enriched mode which are rarely
    useful in this case, such as the the treatment of newlines or the
    keybindings.

I am not really sure what feature you have in mind.
It might be a useful feature, but it would not replace
the existing feature of Enriched mode.