Re: comment-dwim has no behavior to comment out the current line without a region

[Will Farrington]

On Dec 9, 2008, at 2:48 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> > Generally speaking, what makes BOL a "common starting point" to  
> > perform
> > comment-indent more-so than any other part of the line?
>
> I'm not sure it's much more so, but it's at least as common as
> current-indentation, end of line, etc...

Any given place in the line, or end of line, does not have the same  
semantic
ambiguity around what behavior should be when dealing with comment-dwim.
BOL and possibly current-indentation are the only logical places where  
one
could expect comment-dwim (which should do what you mean) to comment
out the current line.

> > Additionally, is not BOL semantically the clearest place to run  
> > comment-dwim
> > and expect it to comment out a given line rather than having it run
> > comment-indent?
>
> Could be.  I'm not saying your idea isn't good.  I'm just saying  
> that it
> is not compatible with the current behavior and that the current
> behavior makes sense as well.  You may find some other way to combine
> comment-indent, comment-kill, and comment-region onto a single key.
> E.g. M-; M-; is currently unused.

It's an incompatible change, yes.

But it's also an attempt to remove some ambiguity from comment-dwim
(which isn't doing what I mean). If the command is meant to "do what I
mean", then for it not to have any method of commenting out the current
line in a single keystroke is, I think, a flaw. It doesn't necessarily  
have to
be my implementation, but given that commenting out a whole line is a  
very
common task, comment-dwim should support some manner of doing this
in a single keystroke, in my opinion.