Re: M-q when the region is active (Re: TAB when the region is active)

[Juri Linkov]

> Actually I rarely if ever use fill-region whereas I use
> fill-region-as-paragraph much more often.  Typically the way this works is
> that fill-paragraph doesn't do the right thing, so I use
> fill-region-as-paragraph to tell Emacs exactly which part of the text
> should be considered as a paragraph.

Most often I use `fill-region' to refill several separate paragraphs in
a selected chapter or the whole buffer.

> This is even worse with fill-region because while fill-paragraph can be
> tuned via fill-paragraph-function, fill-region is 100% hard coded and the
> major can't do anything about it.  This is actually a bug, IMNSHO, which I'd
> like to fix by introducing fill-paragraph-forward-function whose value would
> default to forward-paragraph.

I discovered that some packages in the Emacs source tree already refer
to the function with the same name that exists in XEmacs.  I looked at its
definition in XEmacs and found that it works exactly as I proposed: when
the region is active it calls `fill-region', otherwise `fill-paragraph'.
Is this a good enough reason to use `fill-region' on the active region,
and not other fill-related functions, for the sake of compatibility?

IMHO, it was a good decision to use `fill-region' in XEmacs.  What do you think
about doing the same in Emacs together with your improvements in `fill-region'?

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/