🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <130906@uunet.UU.NET> kyle@UUNET.UU.NET (Kyle Jones) wrote:
> fox@allegra.att.com (David Fox) writes:
>
>> Kill-region would be much safer if the region was highlighted
>> while the mark was set.
>
> This would make using the mark ring very cumbersome.  But if you
> didn't have some way to turn off the mark, the screen would be
> ablaze with light most of the time, because a number of commands
> set the mark.

In Zmacs (TI Explorer version, probably all the others) and, I believe,
in CMU's emacs-like editor Hemlock, the commands which operate on the
region (that is, take the region as an argument) work only if the
region is hilighted.  The region is not always hilighted.

When you set a mark (^X SPC) and move the point to another place, the
text between those two points becomes hilighted.  If you then execute
most other commands (insertion, for example) the text becomes
unhilighted.  The "region" still exists, that is, there is still a mark
in the buffer, but the region between point and mark is now "inactive."
Typing ^W does not work.  But ^X ^X would reactivate the region, making
region-manipulating commands work again.

At top level, ^G deactivated the region if it was active, otherwise beeped.

Many region-oriented commands were written such that they operated on
the region if it was selected, and the entire buffer otherwise.

I sorely miss this behaviour.

	-- Jamie