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From: | Ian Eure |
Subject: | Re: emacs mode line suggestions |
Date: | Sun, 16 Nov 2008 10:12:10 -0800 |
On Nov 15, 2008, at 5:54 PM, Xah wrote:
I basically agree with this stuff. I doubt many hardcore Emacs users choose to switch buffers this way, which requires using the mouse. And the part of the behavior that is least useful is that the switch is blind - you don't know what buffer you're going to get unless you know the current state of the buffer-list.On Nov 15, 1:23 am, Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org> wrote:From:Xah<xah...@gmail.com> Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:18:31 -0800 (PST) • clicking on the file name should not switch buffer.That's not the file name, that's the buffer name.please get the over all picture, not bone picking.As for what it should do, I don't see why your preference is better than the current one. Popping a menu requires another click to actually select a buffer, whereas the current behavior does it in one click.typically, a user has several user buffers open, and as far as i guess many programers who use emacs extensively has like hundreds of buffers open. Cycling them one by one is not much useful. Counting emacs's own buffers, those info, messages, scratch, completions, grep output, shell output, C-h f and friends output, dictionary lookup output, ispell output, man page output ... etc... these are typically looked once and not useful afterwards. Switching and cycling thru them are not much useful.
My objection is to the idea that you don't want star buffers in the list. These are also used for interaction with external processes: *ssh: host*, *SQL: foo*, *Twit-recent*, *compilation*, *shell*, *Python*. It seems ill advised to exclude those from the list.
Where would you suggest showing this information? Some minor modes change Emacs' behavior significantly. For example: auto-fill-mode or abbrev-mode. If these aren't in the mode line, where do you find this information?• Minor mode should not be displayed in mode line. It's confusing. For one reason, it by default selectively display only some of the minor modes currently on, and the selective process is not something people who intuitively understands. For the other reason, Emacs's technical concept of Minor mode is somewhat confusing. Most minor modes in practice are Preferences settings (Mac-speak) or Options (Windows- speak and Linux Desktops) from user point of view.
Can you describe the use case where you do this? It sounds like you have a configuration issue, honestly.• Clicking on the major mode name should pop up a contextual menu to let user switch to major major modes.Switching a major mode is a very rare command, so having this at your fingertips makes no sense, IMO.switching between modes is not rarely used. I'd estimate it is used every other hour at least.
I think the only time I manually switch modes is when I need to use *scratch* for something, e.g. I'll switch to emacs-lisp-mode if I want to eval some code, sql-mode if I want to write a query, etc.
I should probably write some functions to give me *lisp* and *SQL* buffers with the appropriate mode.
- Ian
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