position on changing defaults?

[Dan Nicolaescu]

Hi,

It would be interesting to know the new maintainers opinion on changing
some of the current default settings.

One type of changes would be to make emacs more similar to other current
desktop applications.

Another type would be to provide more functionality by default.

It seems that doing the above two things would make emacs more easy to
use for a larger number of people.  Emacs has a lot of functionality
available, but it's hard to find out about it.  Making it easier to use
some of the available functionality helps a log of users.

One reason to ask if there's a policy in this direction is that
absolutely ANY change will make someone scream bloody murder.  (just
remember that there was resistance even to turning on
global-font-lock-mode by default, which is something that the vast
majority of users want).  And people that oppose change tend to be
extremely vocal.

Obviously any change request has to be judged on it's own merit, but
knowing if there's a clear direction would help.

Here are some examples of changes that could be made:
- transient-mark, selection with Shift-arrow keys

- show-paren-mode on by default
- iswitchb-mode on by default
- bind ibuffer to C-x C-b
- hide-ifdef-mode on by default for C/C++/objc
- flyspell-mode on by default for text-mode

Note that the above are just examples of things that can be done, they
are not given now in order to start discussing doing them.  That can be
done later in separate threads (unless the maintainers want to approve
any of them on the spot :-)

Can you (Stefan and Yidong) please state your opinion about this?

Thanks

        --dan