Re: What improvements would be truly useful?

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2018-03-09, at 05:43, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:

>> Interesting.  I have a very similar sentiment, though I think it is
>> quite irrational.
>> Is mu4e, Org-mode, Calc, or dunnet also "not Emacs"?  If not, how is it
>> different than a word processor?
>
> I don't think I can clearly pin-point the problem, but I think the issue
> has to do with hiding information: WYSIWYG hides information, in the
> sense that there are many different documents with the same visual
> appearance, so the user needs to *guess* what is the underlying
> document's structure in order to know what his actions will really do.
> A typical example is the beginning/end of a bold text which is only
> implicitly represented by the fact that some text is bold and other
> isn't, but that doesn't let you easily tell whether a new word inserted
> between a bold work and a non-bold word will be bold or not.
>
> Of course Emacs can also hide information (as text-properties, as
> invisible text, as data stored in buffer-local variables, ...) but most
> packages follow a design where as little info as possible is hidden.
> Indeed, whenever I hide such information, I think it over many times
> because I know there's a very strong chance that users won't like it.
>
> Also when it comes to data that we edit, hiding information either means
> hiding it as invisible text (which tends to be fiddly, so it's used
> fairly sparingly), or it implies using a complex procedure to `find` and
> to `save` the buffer in order to translate between the file contents and
> the in-buffer contents.  This complexity is a strong encouragement not
> to go down that route.

Thanks, Stefan - this is a very good point.  I guess you managed to nail
it.

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl