Re: line-move-visual

[Joseph Brenner]

Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> writes:
> Uday S Reddy <uDOTsDOTreddy@cs.bham.ac.uk> writes:
>
>>> For normal editing, I like visual-line-mode sometimes (for example
>>> when working on a TeX document with colleagues, which write
>>> paragraphs one one single line).  With that, *all* motion commands
>>> operate on visual lines.  Its default is off.
>>
>> Just curiious.  If they write whole paragraphs as lines, how do they
>> do version control?
>
> It's a good style to write short and to the point paragraphs.  But
> still, the diffs are usually a bit larger than with hard line breaks.

A subject I wonder about some times is why we don't have whitespace
insensitive diffs.

That one simple change could make the tab wars go away.

> Anyway, when writing text I've never felt the need to use version
> control for anything except collaborative but sequential editing and
> backup.  I can't even imagine forking some document, writing an
> "experimental" paragraph and merging that back to trunk some time
> later. ;-)

Oddly enough, it seems that the features we use for code development
are something like what Ted Nelson wanted for writing text back
when he was first thinking about hypertext, Xanadu, etc.  He
really wanted "complex intercomparison" of multiple versions.

I gather that he was envisioning a style of writing where you write a
document in multiple possible ways, and then try to decide which one
is best.

This has never struck me as one of his better ideas... but on the other
hand, wikipedia would be much less useable without it's history and
diff features.