Re: delete-selection-mode

[David Kastrup]

Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 3:35 PM, Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>>> I agree with Richard that the primary concern is doing what is useful
>>> for newcomers.
>>
>> You have misconstrued Richard's post.  He went on to say that what is
>> useful for newcomers isn't necessarily what they expect or "want".
>> There's thus no indication there that he would support the rest of your
>> argument.
>
> Juri can of course be correct too when he interpret this basic part of
> RMS message. You can also be that. However I see no reason why Juri
> can't argue that way.
>
>> The answer is to ask them why they want this.
>
> Have not that been done many, many times - in the context of Emacs and
> in research on user-computer interaction. As far as I understand the
> answer is that new users most often want it to behave as they are used
> to from other applications. They want that exactly because it saves
> them time

Once.

> and avoids confusion (which also costs them time).
>
> I for one agree with that argument.

It is valid, but an O(1) type of argument.  It will not outweigh O(n)
arguments even with a small factor eventually.  If something costs time
repeatedly, saving startup time is not worth the trouble when we are
catering about being efficient on a continuing base.

I already gave a recipe for making mouse-centric people happy with a
mouse-centric subset of delete-selection-mode.

Nobody even bothered to read it, apparently.

-- 
David Kastrup