[ajross]

It's a good rant, but it probably doesn't help its case that it doesn't stop to explain what the feature it's talking about actually is. Emacs registers are a really, really old abstraction. Registers are like separate clipboards, you can put stuff there and pull it out. And there are 62 of them (each associated with a core ASCII symbol: [a-zA-Z0-9]), giving you a lot of flexibilty and a very quick keyboard interface for acting on/with them. And you can even do fun stuff like execute a keyboard macro out of a register. Some people use them heavily. I don't.

Anyway the author is peeved that they changed the default bindings such that there's a modal UI in the way of what used to be a fully-keyboard/home-row operation. It sounds like a reasonable complaint; I'd be annoyed too if they changed something that lived in my muscle memory like this kind of feature does.

[huggingmouth]

I stopped using emacs a long while ago but I rely on x11 selection buffers (middle click paste) heavily so i can relate. I'd absolutly be miffed to find a confirmation model dialog shoved between each select and paste operation AND a lack of a setting to revert to the old behavior.

I say implement the old behavior as an option. It's literally a few extra lines of code.

[morelisp]

There are more than 62. One of the complaints is that the minibuffer breaks access to e.g. the C-a register. One person I know uses letters for positions and C-letter for text so while this may be a very edge case for some I imagine they will be very upset...

[dannyfreeman]

Sounds like Eli is not married to this as the default behavior (I'm not a fan of it either).

From https://yhetil.org/emacs/[e-mail]/

Eli says:

> Now, that others chimed in with the opposite views, we are still discussing what should be the behavior, and once that is concluded, we can talk about the defaults.

[tinus_hn]

‘Default bindings’ sounds like it’s configurable to be different. Is it?

[jsw97]

It is not. That approach was tried and rejected, hence the problem.

[morelisp]

In the interest of fairness, it should be noted a very specific solution was tried and rejected (providing configuration variables to adjust the behavior of `register-read-with-preview`). I personally don't see anything preventing users from configuring alternate commands which call directly `set-register` and mapping those as they please, so in that sense it is still configurable. And in the extreme case you could even use advices, etc. It is very difficult to make something non-configurable in Emacs and I don't see the register system being so ingrained as to be one of those things.

Whether it's a good idea... well, I don't use registers but the whole thing seems like a bad idea to me. I don't think I know anyone who uses registers and would like the new behavior. (But I also understand the desire to modernize `register-read-with-preview` a bit. A better solution seems like it would be providing multiple implementations so users can do the register equivalent of `(fset #'yes-or-no-p #'y-or-n-p)` like every old Emacs user does today.)

[jason_stelzer]

It’s basically global uac-mode for all buffers without the ability to turn it off. If it weren’t true it would be laughable.