Choosing defaults is very difficult indeed. You can never please
everyone. In this specific case, I'm the main guy to blame: I wrote the
original patch for line-move-visual (oddly enough, since it touches
parts of the code I still am not at all familiar with), mostly because
it seemed it would be important for proper support of word-wrap (which
I didn't care for much, but many users cared about it).
Yes, it occasionally doesn't do what I want, but in practice, it does
what I want more often than the previous case:
- when no line wraps, it either makes no difference, or it works
slightly better because it correctly accounts for
variable-pitch fonts.
- when lines are long (typically the "single-line paragraph" text coming
from people who either use word-wrap or longlines-mode or an editor
that behaves similarly, but can also happen in many other cases like
binary files, or mechanically-generated files), the new behavior is
much better (how did you move to "that spot I see about 10
visual-lines down from point" in a single logical line in
previous Emacsen?).
- when the buffer mostly fits without wrapping, except for a few
exceptions, then yes, the new behavior is less good for those
wrapped-lines. In my particular case, such lines are usually (very
minor) bugs anyway, so it's not that important, but I understand that
some people get annoyed. And of course, if you use C-100 C-n instead
of M-g M-g 100 RET to move to the line 100 (I personally use C-s 100
instead ;-), you'll be disappointed, and if you use keyboard macros
you'll also be disappointed.
Depending on your particular circumstances, the second case will only
rarely happen whereas the third will be very common, so you'll be
really annoyed. Sorry about that. Please (setq line-move-visual nil)
in your .emacs and/or try to come up with some idea how we could keep
the advantages in cases 1 and 2 without suffering in case 3.