Re: Enabling Transient Mark Mode by default

[Sascha Wilde]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:

>     > In otherwords, and IMAO, Transient Mark Mode, while good enough for 
> those
>     > who consciously chose to enable it, needs fixing before becoming a
>     > default, if that is to happen.
>
> I consider it unacceptable, without mark-even-if-inactive.  However,
> te change that was installed included making mark-even-if-inactive
> default to t.  That might be ok.  But the person who did it jumped the
> gun.

When starting a freshly build Emacs this morning I was somewhat shocked
by the fact that transient-mark-mode suddenly became default.

It's not that much of a problem for a simple (transient-mark-mode -1) in
.emacs fixes it.  But on the other hand I'm still missing a good reason
for activating it in the first place (after skimming briefly over this
thread).  And "it might be ok" is not equal to "it's a good thing to do",
IMO.

I think we are facing a more general strategic problem here:

One has to turn of more and more features, to get back the traditional
Emacsian behavior (which I consider the best in many cases).  The policy
for Emacs once seemed to be (I don't recall if it was officially stated)
to be rather puristic per default and leave it to the user to turn on
all the bells and whistles and blinken light he wants.  

This is a good thing IMO and I would appreciate if less features would
be turned into defaults (even if many of them are surely useful).

I for one prefer to look into the manual to learn how to turn some great
feature on, than to feel forced to search for a way to turn a feature of,
which I consider annoying...

cheers
sascha
-- 
Sascha Wilde 
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