Re: Rectangular regions

[Josh]

On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 12:00 AM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> From: Josh <address@hidden>
>> Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2013 16:35:05 -0700
>> Cc: Daniel Colascione <address@hidden>,
>>       Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>,
>>       emacs-devel <address@hidden>
>>
>> I also use rectangle commands in programming modes from time to
>> time, and not in comments.  For example, I can often perform
>> simultaneous edits to common substrings of columnar data such as
>> enum elements far more efficiently with a rectangle command than I
>> could using a keyboard macro or replace-regexp.
>
> The important questions: are these uses more frequent than using GUD
> on the same sources?

As I never use GUD at all, yes.  None of my Emacs-using coworkers do
either, FWIW.  I'd be surprised if a large proportion of typical Emacs users
(i.e. not those who frequent emacs-devel) used GUD; do you have reason
to believe that is the case?

>> I also use rectangle commands quite often when when transforming
>> extracts from log files into a form suitable for programmatic use.
>
> In this case, the rectangular mark is not set in a buffer where the
> major mode supports some programming language.  So I don't think these
> cases count for the discussion at hand.

Your premise is incorrect.  I insert raw log extracts into C or Verilog mode
buffers from the system clipboard or via insert-file and perform the edits
there using rectangle commands.