Re: Replacing huge hidden selection when pasting text

[Alexandre Oberlin]

Hello,

Thanks Drew for your understanding. I don’t think I lost much data this
time because I automatically perform the awfully outdated rcs (hopefully
nobody tries to "maintain" rcs to make it behave like a Microsoft
application!) and also have some backup strategy. This time I simply lost
about two hours, but I am still under this threat and might have other
files corrupted without having noticed.

> But if you can describe what you did in more detail it would help.
No problem:
C-y
C-x C-s
No prompt, no auto-saved copy, no warning whatsoever: farewell!

What is still worse is that this does not even happen consistently (only
say 50% of the times). The behavior is affected by repeatedly setting the
mark (C-space). Just reading the help for such a simple command as
(set-mark-command ARG) is a mere piece of fun. Don’t Emacs
developers/maintainers understand that an editor is to be USED by USERS,
not constantly modified and absurdly complicated by people trying to show
up their skills?

I use GNU Emacs in several contexts:
1. Standard Debian 8 installation
2. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Live with persistence
3. Cygwin on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1
I use the same .emacs for all contexts. For several years now I’ve not been
able to get a safe, stable and sufficiently convenient behavior anymore,
especially relative to clipboard and accented characters.





On 24 December 2015 at 02:37, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:

> > I have stopped hoping that the current maintainers of Emacs still have an
> > ounce of common sense. How on Earth can it be possible (and quite easy)
> to
> > allow replacing a huge hidden selection when pasting text without any
> > warning ? I have lost large amounts of data with this incredibly stupid
> > behavior. There isn't even a warning when saving a file which has shrunk
> a
> > lot, like there once was. How can I DEFINITELY avoid overwriting an
> > invisible selection in all versions of Emacs?
>
> I can tell you are upset, and I would be too, no doubt.  But if you
> can describe what you did in more detail it would help.
>
> At the very least it might help others avoid the same gotcha that
> apparently bit you.  This is a user help list, and most people
> reading it and contributing to it are users, like you.
>
> If you can provide a step-by-step recipe to describe what you did
> and what happened, that can also serve as a bug report or enhancement
> request, which you can post using `M-x report-emacs-bug'.
>
> HTH.
>