Re: address@hidden: asymmetries and contradictions in shell navigation using C-a and C-e on a prompt line]

[Miles Bader]

address@hidden (Kim F. Storm) writes:
> I don't understand.  How does emacs know when it's currently in an important
> case...

What are you talking about?  I mean _I've_ thought about how things
work, and considered the important cases when the current mechanism is
confusing in this way, and decided that this is a good solution.

> I said 'indicates' -- as the major example of using this feature doesn't
> work, and need to be reworked using more machinery (rather than less).

Of course it works.  The reason why it's a bit wierd is because the
input field is at the of the buffer, and _everything_ involving
text properties works a bit oddly at the end of the buffer.  [your
proposed `solution' would have exactly the same problem!]

> Ok, but it sometimes does make sense to navigate inside the prompt.
> C-e -> goto end of prompt (= start of input), another C-e -> go to
> end of input.  Isn't that how it's working now?

Yes, but people apparently don't like it (I don't really care).  They
want C-e to go to the `end of something', not `the beginning'.  Even
though the `background' is a field too by definition, people think of
the input field as being distinguished from the background, and I
suppose emacs ought to respect that.

> I thought you were proposing to change, end-of-line and other
> commands to behave differently if point is "inside" a field.

I'm proposing changing the way the field-restriction functions work
(which are called by anyone that cares about a field) to not act like
it's a field when the field property is nil.

> I referred to that as "messy" (compared to doing it through command
> remapping).

I suspect trying to do it through command remapping would actually be a
lot messier -- because you're only changing things at a surface level,
you have a lot more special cases to worry about.

[and in any case, the current mechanism (1) exists, and (2) works quite well]

-Miles
-- 
I'd rather be consing.