Re: Why do all the XEmacs defaults suck? (was Re: Why using (push-mark) ?)

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp&gt; writes: dv> I don't think so. The fact is that all the *behaviors* dv> are preferred by somebody. Thank you, for saying what I meant. This is an important distinction. dv> However, if the behavior the user is facing is not obvious, in dv> other words "why the fuck did xemacs do this?!" then, it's the dv> wrong default. I possibly wouldn't be an Emacs user today if Emacs didn't do things that confused me (modes are very important, probably sufficient reason). I never would have learned a lot of things. Possibly including how to invoke minor modes. And I would have played a lot more Adventure, a need well-satisfied by reading Emacs docs instead. For example, recently I've been using vi (in the jvim version) a lot because I'm beta-testing Japanese environments and Mule works _too_ well (believe it or not, Ripley). Even after 17 years of nearly exclusive use of Emacs and variants, I could get used to vi's command interface, and use external tools like sort(1) instead of `sort-lines' etc. But I will not give up the flexibility of Lisp, which I learned about precisely because I had to use Info and apropos to figure out what Emacs was doing. I incline, therefore, to oppose the Happy-Happy-Windows[1] defaults, which you are arguing for (in some form). I think Emacs doing powerful and useful, but non-obvious, things is an important part of the education of the new user. I do think that users who want to should be able to invoke even the Happy-Happy-Windows theme as easily as invoking a minor mode. But I definitely disagree with it being the default. I agree that _safety_ is important to the new user. But this is difficult to characterize. With undo and the kill ring, (permanent) data loss is fairly unlikely; but that safety net doesn't help with "position loss". I'm evidently in a small minority here, but the positional safety net of `beginning-of-buffer' doing (push-mark) is more important to me. That, and a myriad of similar conveniences _which were the defaults_, are another important component of why I chose to use GNU Emacs, instead of vi (or jed, for that matter). Footnotes: [1] When someone comes up with a less biased description, I'll use it. Until then, I'm going to use this crude propaganda. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +1 (298) 53-5091 __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ What are those two straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."