Re: Rethinking count-words-region

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Chong Yidong <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:41:42 -0400
> 
> The command `count-words-region', newly introduced for Emacs 24, is
> inconsistent with the pre-existing `count-lines-region'.  If no region
> is active, the former reports the number of words in the buffer
> (implemented in Bug#9429).  The latter always reports the number of
> lines in the region, whether or not it is active.
> 
> The two ought to be consistent.  The behavior of `count-words-region' is
> the better one, I think, even if adopting it incurs some backward
> incompatibility.

What will such a change do to those who (like yours truly) disable
transient-mark-mode, which AFAIK means the region is never active?  I
do want to be able to count lines (if not words) in the region.

At the very least, the command should behave like before if
transient-mark-mode is disabled.