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Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused.
From: |
Stefan Monnier |
Subject: |
Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused. |
Date: |
Thu, 28 May 2009 21:55:51 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.0.94 (gnu/linux) |
> Hmmm. No you haven't. You have noted one of the circumstances in which
> a mark becomes active, yet haven't said what it is for a mark to BE
> active. It is as though a young child has asked you what "pregnant"
> means, and the entire gist of your answer is "a woman becomes pregnant
> after a kissing and cuddling session". Unless you mention the growing
> foetus, your answer is evasive and unhelpful, in fact not really an
> answer at all. What, exactly, is the essence of "active"ness, in the
> same way that the foetus is the essence of pregnancy?
The problkem is that the activeness of the mark doesn't describe some
property of some other state. It's a state itself. In your analogy,
there's no foetus that would allow us to determine whether the mark
is active. All we have is the `mark-active' variable, so in the end all
we can say is "the mark is active if the mark is active".
> I think the answer has got to be along the following lines: "The region
> is called @dfn{active} when Emacs marks it internally as the portion of
> buffer which any of a certain set of commands is to work on, when
> otherwise the command would use the whole buffer, or a single word, or
> some other portion of buffer. When the region is active, the mark is
> also said to be @dfn{active}." - essentially the (iii) from my previous
> email. Sorry for the poor wording - it's late and I'm tired.
I would find this fairly confusing, giving the impression that Emacs
magically sometimes marks the region in some way outside of the
user's control.
> Surely, it is better to regard the mark and region as being inactive
> when t-m-m is disabled?
That's a delicate question, because mark-active sadly disagrees
with you. Basically, I'd agree, but the code needs to be changed to
reflect that (by basically introducing a notion of "existing mark" as
distinct from "mark active").
Stefan
- Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Alan Mackenzie, 2009/05/28
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Chong Yidong, 2009/05/28
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Alan Mackenzie, 2009/05/28
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Chong Yidong, 2009/05/28
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Alan Mackenzie, 2009/05/28
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Davis Herring, 2009/05/28
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Alan Mackenzie, 2009/05/29
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Chong Yidong, 2009/05/28
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused.,
Stefan Monnier <=
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Kevin Rodgers, 2009/05/29
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Andreas Roehler, 2009/05/29
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Stephen J. Turnbull, 2009/05/29
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Alan Mackenzie, 2009/05/29
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Stephen J. Turnbull, 2009/05/31
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Eli Zaretskii, 2009/05/29
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Alan Mackenzie, 2009/05/29
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Eli Zaretskii, 2009/05/29
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Alan Mackenzie, 2009/05/29
- Re: Documentation of transient-mark-mode is sloppy, wrong, and confused., Stefan Monnier, 2009/05/29
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