Re: Why act from point forward by default, instead of whole buffer?

[Davis Herring]

> General question that occurred to me while reading thread
> "keep|flush-lines,
> how-many to be used backward": What is the advantage of having such
> commands
> (`keep-lines' and many others) act, by default, from point forward instead
> of (by default) on the entire buffer?
>
> They do act on the region, if it is active, so that's good. But why not
> have
> the entire buffer be the default if the region is not active? I use that
> behavior for many commands I define.

Not everyone uses Transient Mark mode.  If they acted on the whole buffer,
you would have to use narrowing to restrain them in any way.  By acting
forward, one common case can be handled with no prefix, and the whole
buffer with just M-<, and narrowing (again) otherwise.

Davis

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