Another Emacs incompatibilty

[Torbjörn Granlund]

Rms once said something along the lines of

  Imagine if every car manufacturer would need to rearrange the controls
  of their car in order to avoid look-and-feel copyrights.

The picture was clear, the steering wheel, the brake pedal, the gear
shift would all need to be changed around for each manufacturer.

What does this have to do with emacs?  Well, each emacs release changes
things to make much of what we long term users have gotten accustomed to
invalid.  A few releases back, the way the area between the mark and the
insert point worked was fundamentally changed.  (Replace the steering
wheel with a lever!)

Indent region?  Change that to a different key!  (Replace the braking
pedal with a handle bar!)

Encrypted email broke with incompatible changes in emacs 25 or 26.  I
spent many hours trying to get it to work again, but had to give up.  In
the end I essentually stopped encrypting email.

Now, with emacs 27 gremlins are inserted each time a window's focus
changes.  I need to either suspend emacs before changing focus, or undo
these gremlin insertions when returning to emacs.ÄOÄIÄOÄI

Oops, some gremlins snuck in there.ÄOÄI
And there.  Oops agaun.

There have been dozens of other major incompatible changes in the last
10 or so years.  To me, emacs is in a state of deterioration.  By all
means, add features.  Don't mess with the existing interface.  Don't
break things.


I am sure I could maintain an ever increasing .emacs to work around most
of the incompatibilities and keep the controls work as they did.  If
only I had some more hours each week.


Torbjörn

GMP maintainer (previously worked on gcc, foundations of glibc, and
several GNU command line utilities)