Re: Recent commit modifying mark-whole-buffer (master/aeb613ea95b7970e66d663ec5cba54e9ec0528fa)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stephan Mueller <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2016 22:25:09 +0000
> 
> Kaushal Modi <address@hidden> writes:
> " Question:
> " - Should we revert mark-whole-buffer to its definition before this commit 
> and
> "  mark-whole-buffer and make the cursor intangible by default in minibuffer
> "  prompt?
> 
> +1 for "make minibuffer prompt generally inaccessible" to be more like the 
> rest of the world (at least the parts I interact with).  If that allows 
> restoring mark-whole-buffer to its traditional, obvious, trivial 
> implementation, then +1 more.

Emacs always allowed one to enter the prompt, if one wanted badly
enough.  One use case where this is handy is when you need to copy the
prompt text to somewhere else; I'm sure there are others.  AFAIR, we
make the prompt a field so that simple commands like C-a don't enter
it inadvertently; that measure was good enough for us for many years.
Why isn't it good enough now?

The initial message in bug #21874 provides no rationale for the
request (which seems to be a feature request, not a bug that needs to
be fixed).  So I'm not sure why we want to make such significant
changes in behavior due to that bug report.

Do I understand correctly that the proposed change will disallow doing
that, without some complicated operations that many users won't even
know about?  If so, I object.  Working with minibuffer prompts is too
hardwired into the muscle memory of veteran Emacs users for us to
change that in radical ways at this point.  If some newcomers get
surprised by some of the aspects of that behavior, I say let them get
used, it doesn't take too long to do that.