Re: Emacs standards with regions

[Richard Riley]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com>
>> Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:15:28 -0800 (PST)
>> 
>> I have little doubte, that when each of these features were considered
>> in emacs, lots of diehard tech geekers think they are utterly stupid.
>
> Well, you should doubt it, because tech geekers had no problems at all
> with including CUA mode in Emacs.  The only reasons why it took so
> long for CUA mode to become part of Emacs is that (1) there was a need
> to find a way of doing that without losing important Emacs key
> bindings like C-x and C-y, and (2) the satisfactory technical solution
> was not ready in time for Emacs 22.1, and so was deferred to the next
> major release.
>
>> for example, consider the naming of things. For example, when a emacs
>> user tried to read the online doc of comment-dwim, quote: “If the
>> region is active and `transient-mark-mode' is on, ...”. For more than
>> 99% of professional programers, they'll go: “What the heck is
>> transient mark??”
>> 
>> and if you ask them what is “CUA”, they'd go “HUH????”
>
> No problems here, since those ``professional programmers'' simply
> don't read documentation.  So they will never be stumped by this
> terminology.  But if they would somehow, by sheer mistake, manage to
> read that, there's a Glossary section which explains everything.

Certainly it not being on by default was a bit weird for me. I believe
Emacs 23 it is default to be on.

Even the documentation appears to think the old behaviour was a bit
strange when transient mode mark was not on:

from 

(emacs) Persistent Mark


,----
|       Emacs does not show where the mark is located--you have to remember.
|      The usual solution to this problem is to set the mark and then use
|      it soon, before you forget where it is.
`----

I think I sense a bit of an agenda in that info snippet :-;