Article View: gnu.emacs.bug
Article #99832Re: Emacs not configurable enough? (was Re: bug?)
From: Tom Horsley
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 1990 11:20
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 1990 11:20
49 lines
3729 bytes
3729 bytes
In article <1990Apr13.201812.536@talos.pm.com> kjones@talos.pm.com (Kyle Jones) writes:
> I want the ability to tell Emacs to permit me to type 'y' or 'n' in
> response to *ANY* question (i.e., always to act as though 'y-or-n-p' is
> being called, rather then 'yes-or-no-p').
I don't think this would be wise. Since Emacs allows typehead, you could
answer one of the y-or-n-p questions without even knowing it, with disaterous
results. yes-or-no-p slows you down enough to read the question and to
answer it consciously. There's much less likelihood of your typeahead
doing you in.
The point is that no one cares if *you* think it is wise or not. It is only
important if the emacs user thinks it is wise. That's the whole point of
configurability. I personally ***DESPISE*** yes-or-no-p and would also
VASTLY prefer that there was some way to uniformly replace all instances of
it with y-or-n-p. The biggest problem with it is that it usually prints a
message, some very long absolute path name, then another message which
allows me to distinguish between y-or-n-p and yes-or-no-p, but by the time
it gets that far, the end of the message has been truncated in the
minibuffer and I can't even tell what question it is asking. I have to type
'y', wait 2 or 3 seconds to make sure it is really waiting for the 'e' and
's', then go ahead and type the whole word.
The real problem with the whole y-or-n vs. yes-or-no thing is that the
choice of which to use is left up to the person writing the lisp code, and
since most of the emacs lisp code has been written by thousands of different
people with different personal styles, it becomes very difficult to guess
when one or the other is or is not an "important" question in MY opinion (it
doesn't matter what the opinion of the persone writing the code was, it only
matters what MY opinion is, that's what configurability is all about).
Actually I can simply write a defun for yes-or-no-p that just calls y-or-n-p
(at least I think I can), but that doesn't help the places in the C code
that directly call the C function yes-or-no-p.
About the only thing that pisses me off more than "helpfull" tools is slow
response time. They both get in my way and obstruct the clear path I was
following up until the time they decided to be "helpfull" (or slow).
(One of the worst offenders is revert-buffer. I just typed M-x revert-buffer
for pete's sake, now I also have to answer a yes-or-no question? How much
convincing does it take anyway?).
--
=====================================================================
domain: tahorsley@ssd.csd.harris.com USMail: Tom Horsley
uucp: ...!novavax!hcx1!tahorsley 511 Kingbird Circle
or ...!uunet!hcx1!tahorsley Delray Beach, FL 33444
======================== Aging: Just say no! ========================
Technical Details
Message-ID:
<TOM.90Apr17072023@hcx2.ssd.csd.harris.com>Path:
arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!samsung!rex!uflorida!novavax!hcx1!tomReferences:
<9004121352.AA18442@gem> <1990Apr13.201812.536@talos.pm.com>Show Full Headers
Complete Article Headers
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fb2f1,8642c59dcd01bbed X-Google-Attributes: gidfb2f1,public X-Google-Thread: 102b9a,c2cc61f55756f943 X-Google-Attributes: gid102b9a,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1990-04-17 04:20:23 PST Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!samsung!rex!uflorida!novavax!hcx1!tom From: tom@ssd.csd.harris.com (Tom Horsley) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug,comp.emacs Subject: Re: Emacs not configurable enough? (was Re: bug?) Message-ID: <TOM.90Apr17072023@hcx2.ssd.csd.harris.com> Date: 17 Apr 90 11:20:23 GMT References: <9004121352.AA18442@gem> <1990Apr13.201812.536@talos.pm.com> Sender: news@hcx1.SSD.CSD.HARRIS.COM Organization: Harris Computer Systems Division Lines: 49 Posted: Tue Apr 17 12:20:23 1990 In-reply-to: kjones@talos.pm.com's message of 13 Apr 90 20:18:12 GMT