Fwd: Keeping up; was Another Emacs incompatibility

[Francis Belliveau]

I accidentally sent this to Eli when I meant to send it to the list.
Sorry for the double-tap Eli.

Here I am rolling back the conversation a bit with a response to two good posts 
at the bottom.

Stefan is correct, every change will cause somebody to be unhappy.

My biggest problem is with the rate that I move from one version to the next.  
I remember emacs 19 causing all kinds of problem with my customizations.  I 
still have an e19hacks.el file in use.
I usually upgrade only every 3 or 4 major revisions at as time.  It is 
difficult to keep up with what needs to be done to fix all the problems.  I am 
still having a lot of problems with 26.1, but I am sure that some of the 
annoyances could be OS related.  This new replace-region is a problem, but I 
have adapted by making sure that I move the cursor after placing the mark.  
Highlighted region is another. I just use ^g to work around it

Eli says that things are always announced in NEWS.  I never heard of that so 
now I need to read everything since 23.x to figure out what to turn off and how 
to repair all the automated indenting back to my liking.

I have not yet asked any questions, after months of use, because I have yet to 
find the time to dig into the documentation regarding how all this is supposed 
to work.  I never did fix Java the way I wanted it in 23.x and now C and C++ 
are working differently.
Is this frustrating? YES.
Whose fault is it? Mostly my own for not keeping up.


Now let me ask a question that I have trouble with for a long time.  My 
customizations turn off the menus and tool-bars because they take up valuable 
screen-space and I hate leaving the keyboard to use them.
However, I often end up on a machine where my custom stuff does not exist and 
accidentally change the focus within emacs to a menu while moving focus between 
windows.
How do I get emacs to focus back on the buffer so that I can go back to 
typing?I generally fight my way out of the problem, but I have yet to find a 
magic combination that I can remember to use next time

Fran


> 
>> On Aug 17, 2020, at 12:08, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Emacs doesn't change such basic traits of its usage, either.  We
>> haven't changed the command-line options, didn't change the documented
>> APIs of Emacs primitives in incompatible ways, and '+' still adds,
>> doesn't subtract.  However, Emacs has several orders of magnitude more
>> features as aspects than the likes of cp and mv, and as time passes
>> and the Emacs audience changes, the popular demand for some of them
>> also changes.
>> 
>> In any case, whenever a backward-incompatible change happens, there's
>> usually a way, called out in NEWS, to get back old behavior.
>> 
> 
>> On Aug 17, 2020, at 16:42, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> 
>> For any change to Emacs (new feature, change to defaults, bug fix, you
>> name it), one can easily come up with some scenario where the change
>> results in an undesired result [ the credibility/likelihood of the
>> scenario may vary widely, of course ].  So the only really safe way to
>> avoid introducing new problems is to leave the code 100% unchanged.