Re: line-move-visual

[Alan Mackenzie]

In comp.emacs Uday S Reddy <uDOTsDOTreddy@cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:

>> It's far from obvious that this change (line-visual-mode being set) is
>> a Bad Thing.  Without it, moving around things like log files with 300
>> character lines was an utter pain.  I'd suggest it was more of a pain
>> than the one you're suffering, because it hit users using Emacs in its
>> principal way of working, rather than in special cases in some obscure
>> feature (keyboard macros).

> If line-move-visual was nil by default, would you have been able to set
> it to t  in order to move around the log files?

WADR, that's a silly question.  This entire thread has been solely about
default settings, as are many discussions on the devlopers' mailing list.

However, the fact is that I didn't actually set line-visual-mode in any
Emacs before 23.  That suggests I either wasn't aware of this setting, or
the pain it caused me, whilst real, didn't cross some sort of (fairly
high) threshold.  I honestly can't remember any more.

When using Emacs as a full screen editor (how it's used most of the
time), a key binding is needed to go to the next/previous visual line.
Using C-p/C-n (or <up>/<down>) seems as good a choice as any.

> Cheers,
> Uday

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).