Re: Scratch buffer annoyance

[Tassilo Horn]

David Reitter <address@hidden> writes:

> On 17 Jul 2007, at 16:05, Richard Stallman wrote:
>
>>     Wouldn't it be smarter to make the initial splash screen the
>>     current buffer when Emacs starts instead?  It would make sense
>>     for that to be read-only, and when one does C-x C-q, it could for
>>     example clear it and toggle the read-only status of the buffer
>>     (with a brief note in the initial splash screen that one can do
>>     C-x C-q to convert it into a "scratch" buffer).
>>
>> It is an interesting idea.  What do others think?
>
> This will make Emacs even more difficult to use for new or occasional
> users. They would need to know a key combination just to get started.
> And it would be much more annoying than the current situation.

Then all users that like the scratch buffer as it is right now would
need to `C-x C-q' on startup. And what if you don't want the
splash-screen at all?

So I like David's idea better.

> What's wrong with
>
> - automatically saving *scratch* in a place other than ~/ (where it is
> out of the way) via auto-save and before exiting Emacs, without any
> user interaction

Yes, something like ~/.emacs.d/scratch would make sense.

> - automatically restoring *scratch* from that file upon startup
> (i.e. making it persistent)

That would be very nice. Deleting the buffers contents is easy whereas
losing important scratched down work when mindlessly closing emacs is
very annoying.

> - not offering to save it anywhere else (even though users may to C-x
> C-w and save it, thereby converting it to a normal, non-persistent
> buffer, and creating an empty *scratch* buffer automatically).

And I would enable auto-saving for it, too.

> This would preserve the equivalence to a real-life scratch paper that
> one keeps on one's desk, which will not magically disappear overnight,
> but which may be filed somewhere else when needed.

I agree.

> Oh, and it should be in text-mode, because most users will not want to
> hack Elisp.

Probably, but I think it would be good if the mode was specified by a
variable, e.g. `scratch-buffer-mode' which defaulted to text-mode. So
users could easily configure what mode they want to use.

Bye,
Tassilo