Re: Is Emacs becoming Word?

[Steinar Børmer]

Greg Novak wrote:

| * Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
| > This is off by default, so you should look into your customizations
| > and find what turns it on.
| > ... 
| > This feature is off by default as well.  Something in your .emacs
| > turns it on.
| > ...
| > So I think the response was appropriate, and precisely what he
| > needed to hear, since he should look for the reasons in his own
| > customizations.
| 
| This is the fourth time in this thread that I've been told that I must
| have turned on the features myself.  This is in direct conflict with
| the information I provided in the original post.  The strange behavior
| started after a version upgrade, _not_ after hacking around in my
| .emacs file, fooling with any customization options, or anything.

I've seen several cases where a customization in ~/.emacs that's been
there for years (and across several major versions) suddenly stops
working.  That is, the variable might be changed or renamed, and so the
customization that used to work so well suddenly doesn't.  This is
especially common with language or character set settings for people
outside the 7-bit world.

What I'm trying to say is that the reasons some people might have for
saying "It's your customizations" are more diverse than they might
appear.

| I object to being told that I must be mistaken about the basic facts
| of what happened in my office yesterday.  I'm prepared to guarantee
| that my .emacs didn't change one bit in between the time emacs was
| behaving "normally" and the time when it started exhibiting "strange"
| behavior.

As I explain above, sometimes a change in ~/.emacs isn't necessary to
provoke such strangeness.

| * Thomas A. Horsley <tom.horsley@att.net> wrote:
| 
| > As far as new features being on by default goes, I can understand
| > why leaving them on might be a good idea. If I hate them it gives me
| > an incentive to read up on them to figure out how to turn them off,
| > and if I like them, I'd probably never see them unless they were on
| > by default,
| 
| True, but I think a good compromise would be Joe Corneli's idea in the
| post he referenced where new features would be "tentatively" turned on
| and would explain what they're doing, perhaps in the minibuffer, when
| they do something that could be considered "strange."  This could also
| include instructions about how to turn the behavior off.

This would be similar to the features that are currently "disabled" for
new users, such as scroll-left.

-- 
SB