Re: line-move-visual

[Uday S Reddy]

Stefan Monnier wrote:

> I did give you the answer: I tried it and found to my surprise that
> I liked it, so I suggested it and people said "no way", then they tried
> it and some people hated it, while others really liked it.

Yes, you did say all of that, and I understood it the first time.  But, is 
Stefan liking something good enough a reason to change the default behaviour? 
You can set your own defaults in your .emacs to get the behaviour you like and 
so can all the other people.  Does it need to cause an incompatible change to 
Emacs defaults and potentially break the code/macros of people that have 
depended on the old behaviour?  Does it need endanger people who might 
unsuspectingly download packages over the net that might depend on the old 
defaults and have their files corrupted as a result?  I hope you will agree 
that these are more serious questions than merely liking or disliking some 
behaviour.

> So in the end it was a judgment call, and I decided that the added
> convenience of being able to deal with very-long-lines without having to
> change mode was more important.  I.e. I decided that case 3 (in my
> earlier long post about it) was less common and less important.

Judgment call is ok, and none of us can claim that we are perfect at that.  But 
what concerns me is that after seeing all the discussion here, you still 
maintain that you "don't regret the decision" because a lot of people like it. 
 So, are you opening Emacs to potentially unsafe changes in an effort to get 
people to like it?

You also haven't acknowledged that Emacs gets used as a platform on which other 
services are delivered, such as programming environments or mail clients.  Your 
response only touches upon the use of Emacs for personal text editing. 
Imagine, for instance, that your favourite mail client happened to use 
`next-line' instead of `forward-line' somewhere in handling the mail headers. 
It could damage the mail folders irretrievably over a period of time before it 
ever gets noticed.  Is that kind of trouble an appropriate price to pay for the 
"convenience" you talk about?

Cheers,
Uday