Re: delete-selection-mode as default (WAS: Some developement questions)

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Clément.

On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 14:35:17 -0400, Clément Pit-Claudel wrote:
> On 2018-09-10 14:16, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > Actually, I'm not sure what the use of d-s-mode actually is.  I
> > don't recall anyone here advocating it on some intrinsic merits

> I did, in a previous message :) See below:

Acknowledged, thanks.

> > On 2018-09-07 05:18, hw wrote:
> >> When a selection is active, why would anyone assume that typing an 
> >> arbitrary letter is supposed to replace the entire selection, or
> >> to disable it?

> > Out of experience, mostly.  When almost every other program you use
> > besides Emacs behaves that way, it's easy to assume that Emacs will
> > behave the same way.

This is the "do it because everybody else does" bit.  I don't think it's
a sound design principle, particularly for Emacs.

> >> Allowing that to happen is simply a design flaw, or an oversight.

I agree, because ....

> > I prefer to think of it as a very convenient feature.  For example,
> > as I typed this email, I first wrote "as I composed" instead of "as I
> > typed", pressed Control+Shift+Left Arrow, and pressed "typed".
> > Similarly, I had first written "I call it" instead of "I prefer to
> > think of it", and the way I changed one into the other was to select
> > "call it" and type "prefer to think of it as".

.... the degree of inconvenience in first having to type C-w, which is
predictable and goes easily to the finger memory is minimal, certainly
when compared with the shock and pain of having an arbitrary sized
region killed without warning.  IMAO, anyway.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).