Re: change cursor type when idle

[Kim F. Storm]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     If a merge or refactoring with CUA code is in order, then I would think it
>     would be for CUA to use the code from a separate library, as opposed to
>     making users who want only the cursor changes use cua-mode.
>
> That is clearly true.  This feature is unrelated to the key binding
> changes of CUA mode, so they ought to be separated and made
> independent features.

The reason it is tied into cua-mode in the first place is that I
needed to have separate cursor styles for rectangle marking and the
global-mark feature.  

It was then trivial to add a few extra hooks to show different
cursors also for read-only and overwrite-mode.  Separating them
would be harder - as there need to be prioritized between the
different cursor types (e.g. the rectangle selection cursor takes
priority over the read-only and overwrite-mode cursors).

In principle, I fully agree that cua-mode should be completely
separated into different packages, but unfortunately, the features
provided by cua-mode need some rather deep interactions, so it
is hard to actually split them (more than I have already done).

Since it works just fine as it is, I prefer to keep things as they
are now - rather than insisting on separating stuff at the cost of
reduced functionality and interoperatibility (e.g. copying a marked
rectangle to the global-mark works fine now - since the global-mark
and the rectangle functions know about each other...).

And since you can just use cua-mode without the cua-bindings, I don't
really see why having the "cua-" prefix is such a problem to (some)
people.

I wish someone would volounteer to write a cua.texi manual describing
all the features.

-- 
Kim F. Storm <address@hidden> http://www.cua.dk