Re: AW: delete-selection-mode

[David Kastrup]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> "Drew Adams" <address@hidden> writes:
>
>>> telling users ... about the advantage having delsel-mode off.
>>
>> There is none.
>
> You can set the mark, move somewhere else, type stuff there, and return
> using C-x C-x, again typing stuff there, without destroying anything you
> have written.
>
> The mark is, well, a _mark_.  Something you can set temporarily easily,
> later to return.
>
> There is no other mechanism, even half as straightforward and easy to
> use, for doing that kind of thing.
>
> Your polemics are just showing that you have chosen to willfully ignore
> the others' position and the respective advantages they see in the
> current defaults.  Is your position so weak that you have to resort to
> such tactics?

Anyway, here is some suggestion that might better satisfy you without
sacrificing behavior for others: we already distinguish between
transient regions marked with the mouse and with keyboard, namely with:

mouse-region-delete-keys is a variable defined in `mouse.el'.
Its value is 
([delete]
 [deletechar]
 [backspace])


Documentation:
List of keys that should cause the mouse region to be deleted.

You can customize this variable.

[back]

If this variable would be made to accept keybindings in addition to
keys, one could add self-insert-command to this list.  In that manner,
the normal self-inserting characters would delete a region marked with
the mouse, but not marked with keyboard commands.

I am not sure that distinguishing mouse regions at all is a useful
thing, but while one does that, one could make use of it to silence the
I-want-things-just-like-with-Notepad crowd some more.

-- 
David Kastrup