Re: Poll about proposed change in DEL (aka Backspace) and Delete

[Suvayu Ali]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2011 23:42:50 -0400
Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> * Are you in favor of this change?
> 

Yes.

> * Are you opposed to this change?
> 

No.

> * How strongly do you feel about the matter?
> 

Strongly. So much so, that I had advised delete to behave like this when
I was using Emacs 23. I am not an expert lisp programmer, so it was a
bit buggy. When I discovered this feature in Emacs 24 I was happy to let
go of my customisation.

FWIW, if this is customisable by a variable expert users opposing this
change can easily revert back to the old behaviour but new users find
this very confusing (at least in my experience from ~3 yrs back when I
adopted Emacs).

> We don't want to just "count votes" -- we want to understand
> how this affects users.  So if you care about the issue,
> please tell us how the change affects your editing.
> 
> * What are the cases where you find it helps?
> 

Often I want to delete large chunks of text and don't want it to
"pollute" my kill ring. This option lets me do that very easily. In my
experience I find I use this more often when I am writing plain text
rather than programming. IMO, with the advent of more such modes in
Emacs where you edit large amounts of plain text (and not source code)
makes this a very useful feature for me (e.g. message-mode, org-mode,
..). I found default behaviour (like the old behaviour) can be a hurdle
when introducing other friends to Emacs (I was trying to introduce my
non techie friends to org-mode and LaTeX).

> * What are the cases where you find it hurts?
> 

As I mentioned above, I find it less useful while programming but I
wouldn't say that it hurts.

> * What is your level of Emacs experience?
> 

I have been using Emacs for over 3 yrs now. I am a PhD student and my
Emacs use involves a lot of programming (C/C++, python, shell scripts
for my studies and lisp as hobby), writing notes, draft articles for
publications (with org-mode and LaTeX). I am a relatively experienced
user of Emacs (of course not compared to the list members, but in
comparison to my colleagues at the University). On a more fun note, I am
aware of rectangle commands. ;)

> A further change in the same area has been suggested: when there is an
> active region, a self-inserting character would delete the region
> before the character is inserted by default.
> 
> * What would you think of this further change?
> 

I am not sure about this, but this brings default Emacs behaviour close
to other modern text editors. If this is a configurable option, I don't
see any harm.

> Please send your responses to emacs-delete-poll@gnu.org.
> 
> 

Thank you for asking the user's opinion!

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.