line-move-visual

[Mark Crispin]

What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea to make
line-move-visual be the default in emacs 23?

I just found out about this charming "improvement" in the worst possible
way. Investigation determined that a "routine" software update had just
installed emacs 23 and gave me this "improvement".

People wonder why everybody hasn't dumped proprietary desktop software.
This is an example why. Emacs' line behavior has well over 30 years of
history, and some bagbiter goes and changes it BY DEFAULT.

Add all the cute new features you want. But leave the goddamn defaults
alone.

If you want to have your own playpen where you twiddle defaults to your
hearts content, have at it. But don't pretend that you produce software
for a production environment, and stop telling the Linux distributions
that they should "upgrade" to your "improved" versions. People doing real
work depend upon those distributions.

It does no good to say "read the release notes" when the affected users
don't get the release notes and don't even know that a new release
happened. It is also unreasonable to expect users to subscribe to every
obscure newsgroup, forum, and wiki to hear about changes that will turn
their expectations upside down.

Yes, I fixed my .emacs file. And I'm putting in the same change to all
the .emacs files on all the dozens of other machines I use, even though
they still have emacs 22, because otherwise this unpleasant surprise will
repeat itself over and over again.

Grr.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.

[steve gonedes]

Mark Crispin <m...@panda.com> writes:

> What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea to make
> line-move-visual be the default in emacs 23?
>
> I just found out about this charming "improvement" in the worst
> possible way. Investigation determined that a "routine" software
> update had just installed emacs 23 and gave me this "improvement".
>
> People wonder why everybody hasn't dumped proprietary desktop
> software. This is an example why. Emacs' line behavior has well over
> 30 years of history, and some bagbiter goes and changes it BY DEFAULT.
>
> Add all the cute new features you want. But leave the goddamn
> defaults alone.

Thank you. And: please set the terminal environment for the shell.

I use debian; the only way I can do this is by editing the passwd file.
I do not know what systemd is or does.

Changes like sysV run-levels systemd hardly make any changes unless you
where using inittab! Bring back the printcap file!