Re: Aliasing zmacs-regions, providing a transient-mark-mode

Hrvoje Niksic <[email protected]> writes:

> Brian Palmer <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > The discussion of regions brings up a point. GNU emacs nowadays uses
> > transient-mark-mode for what xemacs uses zmacs-regions. The latter
> > name is pretty much meaningless for at least us novice users, and
> > similarly the first sentence of the docstring (*Whether LISPM-style
> > active regions should be used.), which is a bummer since that's the
> > sentence that shows up in apropos searches.

> The problem is that we do *not* support transient-mark-mode, which is
> in many ways subtly difference from zmacs-regions.  

Could you expand on those subtleties at all? I rarely use gnu emacs,
nor do I often use non-nil zmacs-regions, but I haven't noticed those
subtleties when I do use them. The glaring exception would be some of
the customization gnu emacs offers:

,----[ (emacs) Transient Mark ]
| When multiple windows show the same buffer, they can have different
| regions, because they can have different values of point (though they
| all share one common mark position).  Ordinarily, only the selected
| window highlights its region (*note Windows::).  However, if the
| variable `highlight-nonselected-windows' is non-`nil', then each window
| highlights its own region (provided that Transient Mark mode is enabled
| and the mark in the window's buffer is active).
| 
| ...
| 
|    If the variable `mark-even-if-inactive' is non-`nil' in Transient
| Mark mode, then commands can use the mark and the region even when it
| is inactive.  Region highlighting appears and disappears just as it
| normally does in Transient Mark mode, but the mark doesn't really go
| away when the highlighting disappears.
`----
But those would seem like relatively minor things.

> And, to me at
> least, transient-mark-mode is about as informative as zmacs-regions.

really? To my mind, t-m-m has three advantages:
1.  It's what gnu emacs uses, so at least half the documentation out
there will be using that terminology. Not reason enough by itself, but
along with the following reasons ...
2. transient-mark-mode suggests it has something to do with the mark,
and something to do with a transient nature. The mode suggests it's
going to be a toggleable state.  
3. Once you do learn about the variable, it's clear that
non-nil transient-mark-mode makes the mark transient. Whereas
non-nil zmacs-regions means that the mark acts like it does in zmacs,
which means... er, well, I'm sure if you've *used* zmacs it's clear. :-)

-- 
I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard.