Re: Enabling Transient Mark Mode by default

[David De La Harpe Golden]

On 20/02/2008, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
> Jason Earl <address@hidden> writes:
>
>  > The alternative, as the manual points out, is to enable
>  > transient-mark-mode and have Emacs work like most newbies
>  > would expect a text editor to work.
>
>
> You are presuming that enabling transient-mark-mode makes Emacs work
>  like most newbies (or people) would expect a text editor to work.
>
>  I disagree strongly with that presumption.  Other editors have marked
>  regions that are _independent_ of point.

No doubt some might, by what editors?  kedit/gedit certainly seem to
handle it in a non-point-independent fashion, much like emacs,  main
difference is that the point may be visually hidden while their region
is active and vice-versa - emacs doesn't hide the point when the
region is active (nor does kedit actually, but it uses a thin
intercharacter vertical line cursor.  I myself have occasionally made
"off by one" errors because I've mistaken a still-visible block cursor
as part of the transient-mark-highlighted region in emacs, but these
days they're different colours on my display so I don't do that.)

It always seems to be at one end of the region though, as confirmed by
hitting an unshifted cursor movement key, which insta-deactivates the
region in kedit/gedit, with the cursor ending up on one side of the
ex-region. And hey, keyboard region selection is  by moving the point
with shifted cursor keys in kedit/gedit, so  I don't think
"independent of point" is a sane description.

Emacs with cua-selection-mode and transient mark mode really is pretty
close to other editors' behaviour.  Also need to adjust mouse and
interprogram behaviour, but hey I've bombarded the list with (slightly
less than perfect) patches to do that already.

What IS very different is that most editors allow the point to move
offscreen when scrolling...