[implementations-list] buggy behaviour with Transient Mark Mode disabled

Tue Apr 13 23:06:32 CEST 2010

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 07:16:51PM +0000, Vegard Øye wrote:
> Transient Mark mode doesn't necessarily hightlight the region; it
> creates a distinction between "active regions" and "inactive regions".
> By default, the region is inactive; it has to be /made/ active to be
> highlighted. When Transient Mark mode is disabled, on the other hand,
> there is no distinction; the region is just the region.

Actually, IIUC that depends on the value of `mark-even-if-inactive'. If
it is nil, there is no distinction between active and inactive region in
TMM -- either there is a region (active and highlighted) or not (IOW --
any use of `set-mark-command' activates TMM).

But yeah, the behaviour is in some ways confusing to me, too.

> Vimpulse wants the distinction between "active" and "inactive",
> because it allows it to reliably identify selection commands like
> `mark-sexp' and `mark-paragraph', which activate the region in
> Transient Mark mode. So, when you press "d M-h", the region is
> activated, and that region is deleted. When you press "d w", the
> region is not activated, so a motion range is constructed instead, and
> that range is deleted.
> 
> It's this distinction which makes Transient Mark mode valuable,
> although it is a PITA to get the frequent enabling/disabling to work
> smoothly.

Hm. I assume you know about the possibility to set `transient-mark-mode'
to `lambda' or `(only . OLDVAL)' and it does not help the problem?

> > You don't even need multiple files for your debugging method. You
> > can unload the features one by one anyway (the only difference being
> > `vimpulse' depending on all the others, so you would need to unload
> > it first or use the FORCE argument to `unload-feature').
> 
> Hm. Wouldn't requiring any single feature load the whole file?

Yes. And unloading any feature would unload the whole file. In short,
what I write above is basically nonsense (as is any scheme that doesn't
go with one file == one feature correspondence). Sorry.

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