| Also, registers are a relatively advanced feature mostly used for rapid edits. Registers aren't aimed at first-time users using a mouse. They're aimed at high-speed typists doing complex things. I used Emacs for decades, and never really got into registers. Personally, I tended to use kill&yank for copying, and to use either multiple cursors or one-off keyboard macros for complex edits. But Emacs has tons of optional, advanced editing features for people who want to rely on muscle memory. Adding a confirmation keystroke here is a bit weird. It's a bit like taking an electric piano and adding a confirmation pedal to confirm unusual chords. It just adds one more step to a rapid, complex input operation. But the other important thing to remember is that Emacs has excellent undo. You don't need to ask users, "Do you want to paste register 'd' containing '...'?", because you can just paste it, and let the user undo it if they chose the wrong register. So making a breaking change here is odd, and offering no way to disable it would make a lot of users upset. Emacs predates modern GUI conventions. It's never going to be as familiar to new users as vscodium. So I think there's a good argument for serving power users as well as possible. That isn't to say that Emacs should never tweak the default config or add user-friendly features like the menu bar or visible selections. But it does suggest leaving things like registers mostly alone. |
With paste you can see what got pasted, so you've got a chance to realize it is not what you wanted.
But how about for copy? If you meant to copy into register 'r' but missed by a key and typed 't' would it be noticeable right away?
I don't use Emacs so don't know how its undo works, but when I use named registers in Vim it is often to hold something that I'm not going to paste for quite a while. By the time I notice the error it would be annoying to undo all the way back to the mis-copy.
If copying into the wrong register was common enough to need to be addressed, my first thought would be something like adding a status message pups up for a short time near the cursor that says something like "Copied to 't'".