🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9012111501.AA09140@maui.coral.com>, tomt@maui.coral.com (Tom Tulinsky) writes:
|> I'm typing a letter in Mail mode.  I try to do C-x C-n to set a goal
|> column.  Now I'm getting beeps and my command line says `
|>    "Please type y, n, or space"
|> Why?  What are the consequences?  I type space. It seemed safest.  The
|> letter disappears.

You almost certainly typed "C-x n" instead, and emacs almost certainly
showed you the following message:

"You have typed C-x n, invoking the disabled command narrow-to-region.:
....."

and so on.  It then went on to describe the side-effects of typing y, n, or
Space.  By typing Space, you told emacs to perform this command just once but
not to un-disable it.  After you typed Space, the word "Narrow" appeared in
the mode line for your *mail* buffer.

To undo the effect of a "narrow" command, all you need to do is execute the
"widen" command, which happens to be bound to C-x w.

I suppose you could complain that having narrow-to-region bound to a key so
close to some other key combination is a bad thing, a Reason To Hate Emacs. 
However, that's why the command is disabled by default -- emacs *DID* warn you
that something unusual (to you) was going to happen.  Frankly, "do nothing"
(the n option) sounds a lot safer to me than "try the command just this once".

-- 
Barr3y Jaspan, bjaspan@mit.edu