Re: key to yank text at point into minibuffer?

[Juri Linkov]

>     with every successive `M-n' inserting the next symbol/URL/file
>     name to the minibuffer?
>
> Do you mean insert (so, accumulate) or replace what's in the minibuffer?

I mean to replace i.e. exactly how M-p works.

> Successive `M-n' have the meaning now of traversing the history list. There
> is no reason to confuse people by mapping an additional meaning onto
> successive `M-n'.

There is no reason to limit the default value list only to one value.

> This is a design choice - whether successive `M-.' (or `M-n', in your
> suggestion) should accumulate text at point, as you suggest, or should
> provide alternative kinds of thing at point, as I suggested. I can see
> arguments for each approach.

These approaches are not conflicting.  You suggest `M-.' to accumulate
text at point with replacing alternative kinds of thing at point. And I
suggest `M-n' to replace the minibuffer contents with default values
pre-constructed from alternative kinds of thing at point.  So these
approaches are rather complementary.

>     I have a simple patch that does this for the grep prompt, but
>     it was held due to the feature freeze.
>
>     However, to implement a replacement for ffap,
>
> To be clear about my proposal, anyway: I wasn't suggesting to get rid of
> ffap. I meant only that (even independently of employing it as a poor-man's
> ffap) using `M-.' to retrieve something at point would be useful. We can
> forget about ffap in this discussion.

This is what I meant too: to leave ffap alone, and to develop a simpler way
to do the same things as ffap.

>     it should be improved further to allow extending the list of
>     default values with more user-defined values.
>     I.e. instead of giving the list of default values as an
>     argument of one of the minibuffer functions, there should be
>     a new buffer-local variable with a user-defined function to
>     get some text from the buffer and add it to
>     the list of default values.
>
> I think (but please clarify) that you're saying a few things: 1) Use a
> single buffer-local function, not a list of functions, to retrieve the thing
> at point; 2) Make the function buffer-local; 3) Add the retrieved thing to
> the standard list of default values.

Yes, exactly.

> I spoke to #3 above: I'd prefer to keep the default-value list separate
> from this text-grabbing feature.

Yes, they are separate features.

> They are logically independent: one is decided by the command; the other
> is decided by the text at point and the user.

They are not completely independent: often the text at point is what the
user wants to have in a particular place inside the command in the minibuffer.
And `M-n' does this just fine.  OTOH, `M-.' does the same thing the other way
with more keystrokes required from the user, and still is restricted in what
the user might expect from this feature: to grab successive characters, words,
maybe even lines to the minibuffer the same way as e.g. isearch does with
C-w and C-y.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/