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From: | David De La Harpe Golden |
Subject: | Re: shouldn't `delete-blank-lines' treat form-feed as whitespace? |
Date: | Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:35:49 +0000 |
User-agent: | Mozilla-Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 (X11/20091109) |
Drew Adams wrote:
`delete-blank-lines' treats SPC, TAB, and newline as whitespace. Shouldn't it also treat form-feed (aka \f, aka ^L) as whitespace?
While it's logically formally a whitespace class character, I'm quite unconvinced it would "feel right" to me. formfeed is usually put in much more rarely and with more forethought than space/tab/newline.
It's also not "blank" in one possibly important sense: in emacs "out-of-box" it shows up as a quite visible "^L", whereas SPC/TAB/newline are invisible unless you turn on whitespace.
So delete-blank-lines would end up deleting lines, that from a naive viewpoint, look like they "have something on them".
Imagine you've got a text file with "page breaks" in it (represented as formfeeds as is/was the convention (see "C-x [" / "C-x ]" !)):
^L alpha bravo charlie[] ^L delta epsilonSay I hit C-x C-o where the point [] is. I wouldn't just delete those stray blank lines on the first page, I'd suddenly merge two pages. So I strongly suspect changing it would annoy people who still sprinkle ^L through their code or other files for pagination. Something I guess I personally don't do so much anymore (got a laser printer not a dot matrix...), but anyway.
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