Re: ERC: Scroll to bottom by default

[Deniz Dogan]

2009/7/31 Edward O'Connor <address@hidden>:
>> This has always bugged me[...]
>> Given the nature of IRC and IM protocols in general, I think most
>> people would want to enable scrolltobottom by default and set
>> erc-input-line-position to -1,
>
> I disagree. One of the advantages of using IRC (or IM, etc.) in Emacs
> is that things act like they're in Emacs. If a buffer started keeping
> its last line at the bottom of the window, regardless of mode, that
> would be really weird.

Personally, I don't think that would be weird at all, as it is the way
"many other editors", and especially IRC clients, do it. Now that I
think about it, I would actually like to have that behavior by default
in all of my Emacs buffers... I can see why others would see it as
weird though.

>> to make it act like pretty much every
>> other IRC client out there.
>
> By that argument, we should have kept `erc-prompt-interactive-input',
> which moved the ERC prompt out of the buffer and into the minibuffer.
> But that UI doesn't fit in with Emacs, so we dropped it.

In the case of Emacs and ERC, I think there just happened to exist two
separate "lowermost lines" in the client; one in each ERC buffer, like
mIRC's MDI windows, and one in the minibuffer, like irssi's
channel-independent input line. The analogue to the minibuffer in
other clients could be seen as a status bar (status messages that are
not in the mode line) or a settings dialog (M-x, M-:), etc. And of
course, it could also be regarded a place to put messages.

>> I keep forgetting how to set it, since there are two variables that need to 
>> be changed.
>
> Maybe the documentation could be improved to make how to do this more clear?

The documentation is probably clear enough, I'm just too lazy to read
it. I simply don't see the point in having half a window of empty
space in an IRC buffer. In my eyes, the current defaults are just a
waste of screen space in the name of being like the rest of Emacs in
general.

Another idea would be to automatically set erc-input-line-position to
-1 when erc-scrolltobottom-mode is started. I can't see how
erc-scrolltobottom-mode would be useful without it. What do you think?

-- 
Deniz Dogan