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Re: line-move-visual
From: |
Uday S Reddy |
Subject: |
Re: line-move-visual |
Date: |
Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:11:33 -0000 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 Thunderbird/3.0.4 |
On 6/3/2010 11:11 PM, Mark Crispin wrote:
I wasted hours trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my
file, or my terminal emulator window, or my system. The fact that the
problem went away on a different system added further confusion. It was
only when I did ESC <n> CTRL/N and saw that it moved me the wrong number
of lines, but only on one system, that I realized that emacs changed.
And that's when I did ESC X describe-key CTRL/N and read about
line-mode-visual, although it did not mention that this was now the
default.
Surprise. Grr.
Having used Emacs for some 30 years myself, I always expect a few surprises
with a new major version of Emacs. It takes me a few months to read through
all the change logs and the new manual sections to become comfortable with all
the new and changed features. Our sys admins realize that it takes time to get
up to speed with a new version of Emacs, and generally install the new version
along side the old version. They maintain the two for several months before
removing the old version. Sometimes when there are significant new features,
the old version just stays, because several users are uncomfortable with the
new version. The good thing about free software is that you can do that!
I would say your ire should be directed at your downstream distributions which don't seem
to understand what a version change means to users. An Emacs major version upgrade
should never be done as part of a "routine" update. They should never be
installing Emacs without the news file. And, you can't assume that you can reliably use
a new version without reading through the change log at least.
Reading through the emacs-developers list yesterday, I also discovered that there is
an Options -> Customize -> New Options menu, which asks you for an old version
number and lists all the new options that have been added since then. That may be a
good way to figure out what has changed.
---
As I said before, the line-move-visual setting has been a complex decision for the
developers. I have a virtual folder of "visual" messages from the
emacs-developers list, which shows some 40+ threads over the last couple of years, with
each one having been extremely contentious. I am still trying to figure out what it all
means.
It would help the rest of us if you could tell us what problem you ran into
with the default setting of line-move-visual, and why it is important for what
you do.
Cheers,
Uday
- Re: line-move-visual,
Uday S Reddy <=
Message not available
Re: line-move-visual, Stefan Monnier, 2010/12/08
Re: line-move-visual, Tassilo Horn, 2010/12/08
proposed keyboard-macro to record to elisp (was Re: line-move-visual), Joseph Brenner, 2010/12/08