Re: Transient Mark Mode on by default

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Jari!

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 11:01:47AM +0200, Jari Aalto wrote:
> * Mon 2008-03-24 Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> gmane.emacs.devel
> * Message-Id: address@hidden
> > Hi, Yidong and Emacs!

> > On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 07:00:10PM -0400, Chong Yidong wrote:
> >> that Transient Mark Mode is now turned on by default, in the trunk.

> > I feel I must protest here as strongly as I can.

> Just like the font-lock, the starting users expect certain features to
> be default in programs.

Most users also expect certain things to be on a new PC - Microsoft
Windows, for example.  If you were to take this argument to extremes (OK,
I know you wouldn't), we could make Emacs maximally attractive to newbies
by dumbing it down to look like any other Lowest Common Denominator
editor, but none of us would want to use or maintain such a thing.  So,
how far down this road do we want to go?

Transient Mark Mode is, I have argued (in the very post you are
answering), objectively less good than the traditional Emacs mark and
region - it is (i) over-complicated, (ii) modal (in the vi sense), and
(iii) rude.  Please either accept this or take issue with it.  Ignoring
it won't make it go away.

Further, Transient Mark Mode seems to be incoherent.  For a start, by
default (when mark-even-if-inactive is set), T-M-M is a stupid name - a
better one would be "Transient Region Highlighting Mode".  The mark is
ALWAYS "active", for any reasonable value of "active".  Richard's (and
other people's) view that T-M-M absolutely requires m-even-if-i set to be
tolerable is really the view that Transient Mark Mode is intolerable.
For that matter, how coherent is the name "mark-even-if-inactive"?  A
more accurate name would be "mark-active-even-if-inactive" (which
approaches jibberish), or better "mark-always-active".

To see this confusion, just peruse this sentence from the page "Transient
Mark" in the Emacs Manual:

       If the variable `mark-even-if-inactive' is non-`nil' in Transient
    Mark mode, then commands can use the mark and the region even when it
    is inactive.

- "active" and "inactive" seem to have lost all connection with their
normal meanings in this sentence.  Unless you're Lewis Carroll's Humpty
Dumpty, words mean things, and their meanings are important.

I would contend that this manual page is one of the worst - you cannot
grok T-M-M by reading this page; you can only manage this by
experimenting.

It's not clear to me why anybody would want to make the mark inactive.
Does anybody at all _really_ want to be beeped with "The mark is not
active now" when trying M-w?  That's not a rhetorical question.

In truth, T-M-M is a ragbag of features arbitrarily conflated into a
single option: There's (i) region highlighting; (ii) a variant of
narrowing, for certain commands; (iii) disabling the mark.  Anything else
I've missed?

> This is good news and helps introducing Emacs to the wider audience.

Yet to get this wider audience, what this wider audience is getting is
getting less and less like Emacs.

> The opposite can be easily be configured in ~/.emacs

This is of no relevance - we're talking about the DEFAULT Emacs in this
thread - what newcomers should be seeing.

As somebody who prizes simplicity, clarity and logical cohesion, making
this psuedo-T-M-M default fills me with revulsion.  There's got to be
better ways of attracting new users.

> Jari

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).