Re: Preserving sanity in Emacs [Re: rampant region highlighting]

[Alan Mackenzie]

Morning, David!

On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 12:07:44AM +0100, David De La Harpe Golden wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> > With LCD[*] editors, sometimes pressing 'a' will teleport you to far
> > off place, sometimes not.

> "a" is still always inserted where the point is...

... and sometimes has the side-effect of completely overwriting the
screen with the text from a different part of the buffer, sometimes not.

> > So, how do you move point rapidly to somewhere else in a buffer?
> > There's not much point using the <page down> key, if the moment you
> > try to do something you're jump-scrolled back to where you started.  

> That just depends on whether you conceptualise a "page down" keypress
> as "move the point down by a page, and scroll to follow" or "scroll the
> viewport down (or up) by a page".

No it doesn't.  You should be a politician.  ;-)  The key sequences you
need depend on what has been implemented, not the conceptualisation which
gave rise to that implementation.  I want to scroll with <page down> and
then type text at the place I've scrolled to.  How?

In Emacs, point is where you do things.  To indicate where something is
to be done, you put point there.  So you need to put point at the
position to indicate where you want to put point.  I don't think you've
answered this, er, point in what follows.

> Actually, both would be possible from the keyboard- in most X11 terminal
> emulators, shift-pgup/dn scrolls without moving the point.

AArrrggghhhh!  That's meaningless without saying whether the "moving" is
relative to the buffer position or the visible position on the screen.
I'm guessing you're meaning "relative to the screen".

> (though I guess that should be for shift-selection by pages in emacs,
> and M-pgdn/up for scroll-other-window is handy.  C-pgdn/up is taken
> too, for scroll-left/right (not the most intuitive binding, that, byt
> hey, I tend to use line wrapping anyway), but that really only leaves
> C-M-pgdn/up for page-up-leaving-point-where-it-is.

Exactly!  Bindings involving arrow keys and scrolling keys are precious.

So lets get back to the point.  Do you have a mechanism, not involving
the mouse, by which, having scrolled and left point not on the visible
part of the buffer in the window, you can indicate a position to move
point to and then move it there?

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).