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

Hrvoje Niksic writes:
 > Brian Palmer <[email protected]> writes:
 > 
 > >> 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?
 > 
 > For one, there are behavioral differences I noticed while trying to
 > use FSF Emacs, but which I can't remember right now.

I don't think there was supposed to be a behavior difference at the
user level.  (Prod JWZ if you want the authoritative answer.)  At
the programming level, the big difference is that each command that
should not deactive the mark must either set zmacs-region-stays or
use "_" in the interactive spec.  I thought the GNU Emacs beahvior
of leaving the mark alone except for buffer modifications was more
correct, but I failed to convince Jamie of that.

I agree that the zmacs-regions name sucks but it's too late to
change it now unless we're going to implement the GNU Emacs feature
set.  Otherwise we will get bug reports about the differences until
the end of time.  A pointer in a docstring that leads a new user
from transient-mark-mode to zmacs-regions seems a good compromise.