Re: Poll about proposed change in DEL (aka Backspace) and Delete

[Joel James Adamson]

Le Wang <l26wang@gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 11:17 PM, Joel James Adamson
> <joeljamesadamson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I feel that maintaining the editor-unique nature of the Emacs delete
>> key, rather than adopting the behavior of word processors is crucial to
>> maintaining the uniqueness of Emacs.  It's one of the reasons I use
>> Emacs: the Emacs way makes sense in a way that I strongly prefer.  I
>> never liked the behavior of deleting whole selected regions and I prefer
>> the Emacs way.
>
> I don't want to turn this into a huge debate, so this will be my last
> reply to this that cc's the list.

Sorry, I didn't realize that I'd sent my reply to every address, I only
meant it to go to emacs-delete-poll@gnu.org.
  
> It's not editor-unique vs word-processor.  It's editor-unique vs (web
> browser + email editor + word processor + EVERYTHING).

I see your point, and I know that there's more out there than just Emacs
and Microsoft Word.  My point was that I actually didn't like that
behavior where I had encountered it most (Microsoft Word), and I was
glad that Emacs was different.  However, I can see how most people would
just be surprised.  I just never got why "Unix editors" (I used them
mostly on Unix in those days) like Emacs seemed to make sense, whereas
everything else seemed to enforce irrational behavior.  I can't say why
one thing made sense whereas the other didn't, but I'm sure someone's
done a study on it.

I also get your point about not being surprising: surely Emacs will hang
on to more users if they are less surprised.  However, we're not trying
to take over the world here, are we?  I mean that this is not
necessarily about _how many_ users Emacs ultimately has.  There may be
other factors at play: I am not an Emacs Developer, but I would see the
most important things as providing a well-functioning piece of free
software[1].

The bottom-line for me is what you mentioned: as long as I can restore
the default behavior of current versions with one Customize Option, then
I think the change is fine.

Joel

Footnotes: 
[1]  
http://trashbird1240.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/free-software-at-the-farmers-market/

-- 
Joel J. Adamson
Servedio Lab -- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
FSF Member #8164 -- http://www.fsf.org/jf?referrer=8164
http://www.unc.edu/~adamsonj

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