Subject: Re: bug#15478: cc-mode does not obey electric-indent-mode

From: Josh <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 14:17:23 -0700

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 09:39:00 +0000
> > Cc: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>, Stefan Monnier <
> [email-masked]>,
> >   [email-masked]
> > From: Alan Mackenzie <[email-masked]>
> >
> > Hi, Josh.
> >
> > On Sat, Oct 05, 2013 at 10:04:00PM -0700, Josh wrote:
> > > On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 7:55 PM, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > > > > From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
> > > > > Date: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 21:10:01 -0400
> > > > > Cc: [email-masked]
> > > > > For people who don't like electric-indent-mode, CC-mode's
> > > > > c-electric-flag sucks just as much.
> > > > Who are they, except for you?  Why don't we hear any complaints about
> > > > that, except from you?
> >
> > >     c-electric-flag is a variable defined in `cc-engine.el'.
> > >     Its value is t
> >
> > >       Automatically becomes buffer-local when set.
> >
> > >     Documentation:
> > >     Not documented as a variable.
> >
> > > Do you hear many complaints about other undocumented variables?
> >
> > Here, the variable need only be accessed through the function below.  The
> > emphasis on this variable is only in discussions like this one, not in
> > user facilities.
>
> Right.  And in any case, I meant complaints about the behavior, not
> about the variables/functions that control it.
>

I know what you meant.  The reason I pointed out the fact that that the
variable that supposedly "solved" this is undocumented, that newbies will
not recognize "electric" as pertinent, and all the rest of it is to show
that disabling this behavior is far too arcane and burdensome for newbies.
As Daniel said upthread, "Users don't read READMEs --- they download a
program, try it out, and in 15 minutes or so, decide whether they want to
invest time into it."  I believe that most such users who dislike this
behavior and start down the path I described will fail and be far less
likely to invest further time in Emacs and move on to something else.
Perhaps such users are a small minority; I don't know.  But I attribute the
fact that you see few complaints about this behavior to selection bias,
with some who dislike the behavior not complaining because they gave up and
moved on to another editor while still others who dislike it do not
complain because we managed to disable it ourselves.