Re: Entering emojis

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> First, we don't yet have emoji-insert, it's only on master

I suggest a change on master.

> And second, the current behavior could be quite useful in the Emoji
> case as well.  For example, consider the case where you typed the male
> version and you want to change it to the female version instead.  Or
> when you copy-paste the Emoji from some other text, then want to
> change it in small ways.
[...]
> The behavior you suggest could be a user option, by default off, and
> not specific to Emoji.  Changing the behavior unconditionally, or even
> making that the default of that option, makes no sense to me, since
> the current behavior is very old, and I never heard any complaints
> about it.

Please note my complaint then.  Although I'd like to not only complain
but also more constructively propose a solution: I think that
`delete-backward-char' should treat emojis as single characters by
default.

I find the current behavior far from ideal, and note that it is
different from all other software I have seen.  I also think it makes no
sense.  Having to type DEL five times to remove an emoji is to my mind
clearly not the interface that most users will want.

The UI we have now, and that you claim is superior, is much more fiddly
and error-prone to get right than just running `DEL C-x 8 e' again.
Emojis are similar enough to be tricky to tell apart that I can't see
myself ever being interested in trying to do detailed modification of an
emoji grapheme cluster by hand.  YMMV.

> And I submit that, as in many other situations in Emacs development,
> we are jumping too fast to conclusions.

I agree with the logic in your reasoning as a general proposition, but
the above points still stand in this particular case.

> What's the rush to make changes in unrelated functionalities just
> because we were surprised by a TIL-like phenomenon, with hardly a few
> keystrokes of experience under our belts?

I see no particular rush to fix this.

As soon as emoji-insert starts being more widely used, I expect that
someone will report a bug about this (or complain on IRC and on
Reddit, and perhaps write up a third-party package
"fix-delete-emoji.el", etc.).