Re: Rectangular regions

[Josh]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 10:17 AM, Stefan Monnier
<address@hidden> wrote:
> - `rectangle-mark' will be renamed `rectangle-mark-mode' and made into
>   a proper minor mode.

Most of my own uses of rectangle commands tend to be isolated, i.e. with
intervening non-rectangular operations.  I can see that a modal notion of
rectangularity could certainly make it more convenient to perform
sequences of rectangle operations, but for isolated rectangule operations
doing e.g. `<toggle r-m-m binding> C-w <toggle r-m-mbinding>' would be
less convenient than the current `C-x r k'.

Have you considered implementing a `set-rectangular-mark-command'
that would behave like `set-mark-command' except that the new mark
would have a property indicating that regions it delimits should be treated
as rectangular by rectangle-aware commands?  If this property were
propagated into kill-ring entries appropriately then C-y and friends could
easily DTRT.  If this approach isn't feasible, please consider some other
way to support ephemerally specifying rectangular interpretation of the
region, for example something like `append-next-kill' might be suitable.