Re: Rethinking count-words-region

[Andreas Röhler]

Am 07.10.2011 17:41, schrieb Chong Yidong:
> 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.
>
> But going beyond this, instead of introducing a separate
> `count-words-region' command, why not fold this functionality into
> `count-lines-region'?  After all, `count-lines-region' already reports
> the number of characters, and there's space for it to report the number
> of words too.  And it has a convenient binding in M-=, whereas
> `count-words-region' has no default binding.
>
> Maybe we could rename the combined function something like `count-text'
> (better suggestions welcome).

Hi,

simply "count-words", "count-lines" seems better for me.
A lot of other function restrict to region already, if active.
User may assume that.

When -region is mentioned explicitly, it should require it, not operate 
on the whole buffer.

Cheers,

Andreas