Re: simple editor required

[Stefan Monnier]

> The second problem I encountered was that in the version where
> text mode actually took effect, was that it inserted spaces instead
> of leaving the line empty, when I inserted a blank line.  I haven't
> seen emacs do that before, even when it used to work on an older
> version.  But this is perhaps a case of faulty memory.

I believe that's faulty memory.  Emacs has to insert spaces in order to
place the cursor at the proper place.  But newline-and-indent does delete
trailing space before inserting the newline, so that should work as long
as you bind RET to newline-and-indent (which you obviously would like to see
be the default).

> The third problem I encountered was when trying to manually
> clean up the blanks, ctrl-k would not simply delete the blanks on
> the line, it would delete the entire line.

> Someone has suggested putting:
> (setq kill-whole-line nil)

> to get around this problem.  I didn't have to do that in other
> versions of emacs, it was the basic standard consistent behaviour.

As far as I know, C-k has always behaved like that (at least since
version 18.59): it deletes either "[ \t]*\n" or ".*[^ \t\n].*".
Basically, Emacs encourages you to ignore trailing whitespace and
consider it as non-present.  You can ask Emacs to automatically erase all
trailing whitespace when you save the file, although I don't think that was
a standard feature feature before Emacs-21, so it probably won't help you.

>> Try indented-text-mode instead.

indented-text-mode is the same as text-mode since Emacs-20, so it will
only make a difference if you ever use Emacs-19.

> 2. Block-marking not to be destroyed by ctrl-f and esc-g.  Xemacs
> 20.4 has a you-beaut highlighting of the block, which is great, but
> I'd trade it any day for the ability to do a find/goto to position to
> end of block.  Like emacs 20.7.1.  And like the last time I used a
> version of xemacs, IIRC.  I don't know why some people think it
> is appropriate to forget the marker, seems pretty basic to me, but
> besides, other emacs (like 20.7.1) don't forget the marker.

For XEmacs complaints, go to comp.emacs.xemacs, this an Emacs group.

> 3. DEL to delete.  Just like xemacs 20.4 with appropriate .emacs entry.

You can try (define-key function-key-map [delete] [?\C-d]),
but be warned that on some systems, the backspace key supposedly
sends a `delete' event.
Also it won't do anything on text-terminals where there's simply no
agreement as to what key corresponds to DEL (aka C-?) or to C-h, so that
there's no generic answer.

> I consider these to be extremely basic things that should be provided

Everyone has his own definition of normality.


        Stefan