RE: Why act from point forward by default, instead of whole buffer?

[Drew Adams]

> > General question that occurred to me while reading thread
> > "keep|flush-lines, how-many to be used backward": What is
> > the advantage of having such commands (`keep-lines' and many
> > others) act, by default, from point forward instead
> > of (by default) on the entire buffer?
> >
> > They do act on the region, if it is active, so that's good.
> > But why not have the entire buffer be the default if the
> > region is not active? I use that behavior for many commands
> > I define.
>
> Not everyone uses Transient Mark mode.  If they acted on the whole buffer,
> you would have to use narrowing to restrain them in any way.  By acting
> forward, one common case can be handled with no prefix, and the whole
> buffer with just M-<, and narrowing (again) otherwise.

Good point. So the current behavior is there to fit the default behavior of
not having transient-mark mode on.

We should change the default anyway, so transient-mark mode is on. We've
discussed that before, but the battle has not yet been won. After it is,
perhaps we can revisit this question, since the only reason given (so far)
for this behavior is to fit non-transient-mark mode.