I am a Vim guy. Can someone explain what exactly is broken?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38591788
This person seems to explain it well
Bad NEWS, Emacs
31–40 of 250 posts
Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs
#32I am a Vim guy. Can someone explain what exactly is broken?
In Vim speak:
Imagine you create a bunch of recorded keyboard macros that store stuff in different registers. Now this change comes and instead of typing `"ay` you have to press `"ay`. Indeed any time you store to a register (`"a`) you have to add an enter key. This breaks all of your keyboard macros and all of your muscle memory made over the past twenty years or more.
This is why people are upset.
Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs
#33I'll summarize my understanding.
A commit that changes how copying (actually "registers", which is a bit more general than copying) works in emacs was recently accepted. Now emacs opens up a minibuffer that shows what is happening, requiring one to accept the change by hitting enter or equivalent. The OP thinks this is a terrible, breaking change as it changes default behavior (and possibly without the possibility of easily configuring this away). Further, this happened without much discussion.
Let's state a vim analogy. If I want to copy the current line into my `d` register, I can type `"dyy`. This proposal would do something like, after typing `"dyy`, open up a scratch buffer that tells the user the text and the buffer, requiring a keystroke to close. This is terrible for people who understand registers (the typical vim user). But I acknowledge that sometimes I don't copy the intended text into registers and have to try again. I also know many vim people who only yank from visual mode, which has a similar show-explicitly-what-is-being-copied behavior.
The rest of this article is a description of how the OP tried to raise discussion, but the commit-author, Thierry, shot it down. Implicitly the rest of the emacs dev community is at fault too.
Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I understand your point, emacs is changing very specific behavior, that was intended, to do something new now. So I would say you're xkcd comment is slightly off.
> emacs is changing very specific behavior, that was intended, to do something new now No? It changes how an existing command behaves. > This commit crippled all user interaction with Emacs registers, turning commands such as C-x r s, once smooth and frictionless, into a cumbersome and painful mess. Concretely, instead of just typing the key for the register you want to operate on, you now get a fully blown minibuffe…
with all due respect c-x r s sounds far from smooth and frictionless to me
Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs
#35It's a good rant, but it probably doesn't help its case that it doesn't stop to explain what the feature it's talking about actually is. Emacs registers are a really, really old abstraction. Registers are like separate clipboards, you can put stuff there and pull it out. And there are 62 of them (each associated with a core ASCII symbol: [a-zA-Z0-9]), giving you a lot of flexibilty and a very quick keyboard interface…
There are more than 62. One of the complaints is that the minibuffer breaks access to e.g. the C-a register. One person I know uses letters for positions and C-letter for text so while this may be a very edge case for some I imagine they will be very upset...
Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs
#36It's a good rant, but it probably doesn't help its case that it doesn't stop to explain what the feature it's talking about actually is. Emacs registers are a really, really old abstraction. Registers are like separate clipboards, you can put stuff there and pull it out. And there are 62 of them (each associated with a core ASCII symbol: [a-zA-Z0-9]), giving you a lot of flexibilty and a very quick keyboard interface…
I stopped using emacs a long while ago but I rely on x11 selection buffers (middle click paste) heavily so i can relate. I'd absolutly be miffed to find a confirmation model dialog shoved between each select and paste operation AND a lack of a setting to revert to the old behavior.
I say implement the old behavior as an option. It's literally a few extra lines of code.
Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs
#37I'll summarize my understanding. A commit that changes how copying (actually "registers", which is a bit more general than copying) works in emacs was recently accepted. Now emacs opens up a minibuffer that shows what is happening, requiring one to accept the change by hitting enter or equivalent. The OP thinks this is a terrible, breaking change as it changes default behavior (and possibly without the possibility of…
I just learned a new feature of Vim. Thank you!
Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs
#38I don’t fully understand the nature/impact of the change but this conflict seems so minor to me. Like, people on both sides display the same level of entitlement but for different reasons, and they all think they have their are “right”. Hum, no, for outsiders you all appear stubborn and lacking ability to compromise. “Oh my gosh, I’ll have to press 1 extra key now, this project is doomed!”, “no no no, this little cha…
Breaking backward compatibility should be reserved for extreme cases, and this doesn't sound like one. It's possible the way the author handled it was poor and caused part of the dispute, but I think the right thing would be to make such behavior opt-in or at least very easy to disable.
Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs
#39I am a Vim guy. Can someone explain what exactly is broken?
The Emacs development process
No, I'm not kidding
There is no focus, there's no objective, it seems the louder ideas win but there's no final idea of what Emacs should look like or what/how it should do or not
That's why such breaking changes get in without questioning (and even why they were using such functionality as registers in the first place)
Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs
#40I'll summarize my understanding. A commit that changes how copying (actually "registers", which is a bit more general than copying) works in emacs was recently accepted. Now emacs opens up a minibuffer that shows what is happening, requiring one to accept the change by hitting enter or equivalent. The OP thinks this is a terrible, breaking change as it changes default behavior (and possibly without the possibility of…
I just learned a new feature of Vim. Thank you!
vimtutor is absolutely worth the time