Re: Gratuitous user interface change risks losing user work

[Richard Stallman]

A problem that causes loss of work is a serious problem.  How to
address this one will take some thought, because each of these changes
has a good reason individually.

    I just got bit by this and I bet others will too. In previous versions of
    Emacs C-x C-v (find-alternate-file) used to prompt you if you hadn't saved 
the
    work in the current buffer and you used to have to press 'y' to discard it.
    *Now* it prompts you asking if you want to *save* your work. So if you use 
it
    to revert the buffer to the last saved version -- something I do quite
    frequently and have become accustomed to hitting 'y' quite quickly -- the
    default action is to *overwrite* your work!

Does it really happen that way?  I just tried that case, and it used
yes-or-no-p to ask for confirmation for overwriting.  So if you type
`y RET', it should ask you again whether to save.

Did you respond semiconsciously by typing `y e s RET', thinking
"Dammit I said yes"?

    This is exacerbated by the documented regression in find-file to no longer
    allow the shortcut of simply hitting return to reread the current file.

The reason for this change is to eliminate an anomaly.  The new
meaning (visit the directory) is useful, and the fact that it failed
to work was the anomaly.

It is just one extra character to get the old results: M-n.