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Bad NEWS, Emacs

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Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs

#61

Post by lvncelot »

entropie wrote: post #17

> Since then, another bug report came in from a Emacs master branch user that suffered from one of the consequences of this change (a specific regression that I spelled out days before, but was ignored, for some reason), and several users reached out to the Emacs development in request to restore the previous behavior in an ongoing thread titled “Please, Restore Previous Behavior for jump-to-register”. Astonishingly,…

I mean, we're talking about changing intended behavior here and not accepting any discussion regarding that. Just because you didn't use jump-to-register, doesn't mean no one does. Again, this is not people using unintended consequences of edge-case-behavior, this is people complaining (rightfully so) about regressions that stem from changing the intended UI.

Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs

#62

Post by [deleted] »

juped wrote: post #22
marcinzm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the author's point. They did try to improve the behavior in a future commit and were shot down. Hard it seems. So were any requests from others to change this before release.

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs

#63

Post by binary132 »

Obviously the only possible solution is to attempt another fork/reimplementation of emacs. This one will definitely win and not be totally irrelevant like all the others.

Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs

#64

Post by wavemode »

This thread is mostly "I don't use this feature of Emacs (or Emacs at all) therefore this isn't a real problem, so stop complaining." Poor to see.

I'd rather people who do regularly use the feature weigh in on how they feel about its new behavior.

Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs

#65

Post by CoastalCoder »

addicted wrote: post #55
CoastalCoder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a perpetually novice vim user, I actually would have expected "dyy" to mean Delete the current line. But that probably just proves my novice status.

You’re missing the double quote before the ‘d’ which means you’re talking about a register.

Ah, thanks. You're right, my brain parsed the gp's comment as simply "dyy".

Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs

#66

Post by praptak »

pilgrim0 wrote: post #14

I 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…

> Oh my gosh, I’ll have to press 1 extra key now

This key is in a context which is about as bad as Ctrl-C ("Do you really want to copy this text into clipboard? [Y/n]")

Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs

#67

Post by dannyfreeman »

ajross wrote: post #13

It'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…

Sounds like Eli is not married to this as the default behavior (I'm not a fan of it either).

From https://yhetil.org/emacs/8334wawfvg.fsf@gnu.org/

Eli says:

> Now, that others chimed in with the opposite views, we are still discussing what should be the behavior, and once that is concluded, we can talk about the defaults.

Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs

#68

Post by CoastalCoder »

wavemode wrote: post #64

This thread is mostly "I don't use this feature of Emacs (or Emacs at all) therefore this isn't a real problem, so stop complaining." Poor to see. I'd rather people who do regularly use the feature weigh in on how they feel about its new behavior.

For an established tool like Emacs, it must be hard to decide when it's okay to break the interface. Especially for a text editor, where longtime users' flow benefits from muscle memory.

Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs

#69

Post by lvncelot »

blantonl wrote: post #56

So, what's the "other side's" argument in this? Usually these opinionated changes come with some level-headed reasoning behind the changes. Or maybe not?

This is what I've been wondering here, as well. So far, the downsides (Change to an almost subconscious muscle-memory-task, added friction) of this are pretty apparent - what even are the upsides of this?

Re: Bad NEWS, Emacs

#70

Post by dig1 »

It may be an unpopular approach, but I'm a fan of Linus's "you must never break user-space/UX." Some changes might be trivial for you or even an "improvement" (which is mostly a personal opinion, especially regarding UX, unless you prove it with many research papers or have many complaints). Still, if I hit some key combos 100 times a day in the last 20 years, that became second nature for me. Adding Enter or any other key because "it makes things nicer" is clearly a bug.

I'm also not fond of Emacs's many subtle UX changes in the last couple of years. Enabling eldoc by default, changing "blink-matching-paren" default value... For each new Emacs release, I have to revisit my init.el and revert to the old behavior (thank you, elisp!), because suddenly things start to pop out or jump around. I get it; this is maybe to please the newer/younger crowd who are usually "in transit" - yesterday were on Vim, today, are on Emacs, and tomorrow, who knows, leaving us regular users with "a big bag of odor."

Thanks to elisp, you can bend Emacs any way you want, but don't change default behavior just because "it looks nice to me".

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