Re: delete-selection-mode

[David Kastrup]

"Drew Adams" <address@hidden> writes:

> The risk you describe exists in theory, and I suppose it occurs
> occasionally in practice. But honestly, my impression is that you
> simply have not used d-s-mode much or this would not be a problem in
> practice.
>
> 99.999% (no, no proof; just a guess) of computer users out there use
> this "risky" behavior everyday, all day long, without exploding (and
> without Emac's powerful undo as a remedy).

It is an occasional occuring nuisance in one-line entry lines (where it
causes extra work), and it would be a perfect menace on multi-line
entry, but I don't know of any multi-line entry fields in applications
that don't have undo, most particular not with text editors.

So please match your descriptions of "the rest of the world" to existing
realities.

>> the accidental explosion hazard dominates for me (in non-Emacs
>> environments, where I can't disable the (mis)feature).
>
> Well now. That's JUST EXACTLY the problem we're trying to solve by
> making the Emacs default behavior resemble the behavior outside Emacs.

Applications outside of Emacs don't have a mark concept independent of
active regions.  Emacs does.  Realities don't go away by ignoring them.

> Not a problem. It is only when the region is *active* that typing
> replaces it.  Emacs gives you the best of both worlds: the region can
> be active or inactive.

With transient-mark-mode, it will be active by default, even when you
just wanted to manipulate the mark.

> So we should remove t-m-mode as the default?

If all region marking operations beginners are accustomed to can create
an active region without reverting to transient-mark-mode (and Emacs got
there with mouse-selection and shift-selection), why not?

It makes things more consistent and avoids accidentally active regions
and the connected behavior.

>> Is there any evidence that delete-select-mode is instrinsically a good
>> thing, disregarding the fact that it has become common?
>
> Which do you do more often: (a) replace the text in the region or (b)
> set mark, move somewhere else, and insert text?

Depends on whether I have set the mark for the purpose of creating an
active region or not.

-- 
David Kastrup