Re: delete-selection-mode

[David Kastrup]

Paul R <address@hidden> writes:

> "Alfred M. Szmidt" <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> How about talking about users in general, not only new users use
>> emacs, emacs should have good defaults for both new and old users.
>
> If they had the same expectations, yes. But they are often
> incompatibles. In such a case, new users expectations should take
> precedence, simply because :
>  - new users might give up because they don't realize that what they
>    don't like is only a default setting, not inherent to the emacs
>    program itself
>  - old user know how to change a simple setting in 30 seconds

Expectations should never take precedence when they are connected with
an inferior way to accomplish things.

As an example: I can explain Emacs' general mouse cut/copy/paste
interface in 4 lines of text:

Single/double/triple left mouse clicks mark character/word/line start
respectively of the region.  Dragging or single right mouse click marks
the other end, double right mouse click deletes the region.  In either
case, middle mouse pastes the previous region contents.

That's simple, efficient, and not what the new user expects.  It would
be stupid to hide this very ergonomic mouse behavior away in a
non-default setting: Emacs is such a large beast that people can be
expected to discover about 5% of its non-defaults in their life time.

We don't want to make Emacs an efficient editor only for those who knew
Emacs-19 and can reconfigure all insanities back to more efficient
defaults.

After all: new users might give up because they don't realize that what
fails to make them more efficient than when using other editors is only
a default setting, not inherent to the emacs program itself.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum