Re: Is Emacs becoming Word?

[Greg Novak]

* Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> This is off by default, so you should look into your customizations
> and find what turns it on.
> ... 
> This feature is off by default as well.  Something in your .emacs
> turns it on.
> ...
> So I think the response was appropriate, and precisely what he
> needed to hear, since he should look for the reasons in his own
> customizations.

This is the fourth time in this thread that I've been told that I must
have turned on the features myself.  This is in direct conflict with
the information I provided in the original post.  The strange behavior
started after a version upgrade, _not_ after hacking around in my
.emacs file, fooling with any customization options, or anything.  

I object to being told that I must be mistaken about the basic facts
of what happened in my office yesterday.  I'm prepared to guarantee
that my .emacs didn't change one bit in between the time emacs was
behaving "normally" and the time when it started exhibiting "strange"
behavior. 

* Thomas A. Horsley <tom.horsley@att.net> wrote:
> Perhaps not his own customizations: I know (from my experience beating them
> into submission) that the redhat fedora distribution and the suse
> distribution both do wacky stuff to emacs. I was able to fix redhat with my
> .emacs file once I discovered their annoying site-lisp/default.el file, but

It is now clear that this is almost certainly what happened, given the
several posts telling me that I must be suffering from amnesia since I
could only have edited my .emacs file and turned on the features
myself.  Shame on me for changing more than one thing at once;
initially, emacs itself seemed like the most obvious cause of my
trouble, but now it's clear that it's probably the packager who's to
blame. 

> As far as new features being on by default goes, I can understand why
> leaving them on might be a good idea. If I hate them it gives me an
> incentive to read up on them to figure out how to turn them off, and if I
> like them, I'd probably never see them unless they were on by default,

True, but I think a good compromise would be Joe Corneli's idea in the
post he referenced where new features would be "tentatively" turned on
and would explain what they're doing, perhaps in the minibuffer, when
they do something that could be considered "strange."  This could also
include instructions about how to turn the behavior off.