[Texmacs-dev] Re: Patch #5494: Make selection behavior more standard conformant

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

On Sun, Dec 24, 2006 at 01:10:24PM +0100, Norbert Nemec wrote:
> Lionel Elie Mamane schrieb:
>> On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 06:37:16PM +0100, Norbert Nemec wrote:

> TeXmacs offers two modes of "look-and-feel": Windows and Emacs.
> Therefore, I think, TeXmacs behavior should be oriented on these
> standards. Of course, we have the freedom to deviate from these
> standards whereever there is a good reason, but every deviation
> should be argued well.

Ah, yes, I had forgotten about that preference; so I suppose that the
very best solution would be:

 - getting closer to "the emacs behaviour" in "emacs" look and feel
 - getting closer to "the MS Windows behaviour" in "windows" look and
   feel

It would be rather easy to have "del/backspace" not delete the
selection in emacs l&f but delete the selection on windows l&f. The
other part of your patch is done in C++; how easy is it to make C++
code dependent on a preference? A quick grep through the code suggests
something like:

 if (as_string (call ("get-preference", "look and feel")) == "emacs")

and

 if (as_string (call ("get-preference", "look and feel")) == "windows")

will work, or a variant like

 if (as_string (call ("get-preference", string("look and feel"))) == "windows")
or
 string pref="look and feel";
 if (as_string (call ("get-preference", pref)) == "windows")


> Concerning selection handling, TeXmacs had a non-standard behavior
> that -- to my opinion -- was worse than either of the two standards.

That much is clear :)

> (...) the new behavior (...). Finally, I believe it is better than
> old TeXmacs behavior as well, as I argued before.

In so much as it gets us rid of the "delete selection when you meant
to delete the character near the cursor", it is much superior.

-- 
Lionel