Re: Turning on savehist-mode by default

[Po Lu]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> Turning off savehist-mode will fix all of those, no?
>
> You are basically describing something that can happen with any Emacs
> feature that is turned on by default.  The solution is to turn them
> off when you want to avoid any of their effects.  I routinely do that
> with blink-cursor-mode, global-eldoc-mode, and sometimes others, when
> they might get in the way.  Or invoke "emacs -D".

Point taken.  Still, savehist-mode is more intrusive than those features
one might disable in the course of developing redisplay.

> That's true, but using such multiple sessions (as opposed to a single
> session) is a personal preference.  Resisting some change in the
> defaults because it adversely affects you personally is not a valid
> argument in my book, since defaults exist so users could tweak them.
> If it turns out a vast majority of users want savehist on by default,
> then you and myself will need to adapt -- and the way to adapt is very
> easy.

[...]

> Sorry, I see no problem to solve here, except in the customizations of
> those who routinely run multiple sessions on the same system with the
> same HOME directory.

The natural extension of this line of reasoning is to regard every
feature we wish to eliminate (or banish behind some user option) as a
"user preference," which is quite the slippery slope.  But that isn't
what is being proposed here, so I digress.

My reservations about this are in large part just that no evidence has
been presented demonstrating that the absence of savehist-mode or its
position as a feature disabled by default has made life difficult for
many users, who might as easily enable it in _their_ customizations.
Conjecture from practiced Emacs users (like the OP) comparing Emacs
against other like programs is of little value, and there are as many
programs that prompt users for commands to input without saving them to
a history file as there are that do.  The GIMP comes to mind; no history
is saved by any of its command dialogs, such as the one that pops up
when you type /.