[OS X Emacs] Re: Aquamacs Cursor movement and word wrapping: C-e, C-a, C-n, C-p

Kao Felix kcfelix at gmail.com
Fri Apr 23 20:54:55 EDT 2010


On 23/04/2010, at 18:17, Tom Van Vleck wrote:
> If I now do a C-a, the cursor flies back to before the very first
> character.  Hah, says I, just what I wanted.  Then I do a C-n.
> Ack! it goes down one visual line.  C-p goes up one visual line.
> C-e goes to the end of the whole text.  This is a mixture of
> the behaviors, which will probably confuse everybody.


It's interesting to notice, however, that the Emacs like keyboards on Mac OS X behave like this as well (at least on Mail and TextEdit). C-n and C-p move by visual lines while C-a and C-e go to the beginning and end of the whole "hard line". I don't know while they choose that way and if it makes sense any more than other way. 

I've noticed these days that C-n and C-p where bounded to different things than the arrows and it bothered me. I always expect the arrow keys to correspond exactly to the C-npfb correspondents. But when I saw it I've just changed on my Preferences.el :)

I think this is something where it's very hard to please everyone, but if it's such a frequent concern it deserves an easy and discoverable configuration.

I would like to see all the word wrap configs available on the menu right now unified in some way. Right now they feel a little bit conflicting and confusing. "Auto Word Wrap on Text Modes" gets a checkmark when it's active, but "Soft Word Wrap" does not. Also, I'm not sure what Auto Word Wrap means exactly. Just "Word Wrap" isn't enough? If I have some word wrapping active I expect it to be automatic already. Unless the "Auto" mean something else. 

Maybe if we have a "Configure word wrapping ..." menu entry that would open a well documented, albeit short, customize buffer which reunited all those word wrapping options. What do you guys think? Am I overcomplicating?

--
Kao Félix




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