Subject: bug#32142: WG: 26.1; Problems with flyspell-region

From: "R. Diez" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2018 17:15:12 +0200

> I added the caveats to the doc strings of the relevant functions and
> variables.

That's good, thanks.

> I object to the "unable or unwilling" part of your complaint.
> I was just stating the fact that the feature you expected was > missing from Emacs, because no one designed and coded it.

My "complaining" and your "stating of the fact" are both subjective 
perceptions.

My point of view is as follows: I took several e-mails to fix (if only 
in the documentation) an obvious issue I had reported correctly and I 
had to insist. Your answers were selective, side-stepping the problem. 
Your tend to answer in an authoritative way, kind of supporting or 
defending the current implementation, or negating the existence of a 
problem. It is a frustrating exercise. This is not the first time that 
this kind of "resistance" happens to me with open source projects, or 
with the Emacs developers. It is in fact a recurring pattern.

At least we are getting somewhere, if only through your doc improvements.

> ??? Did you read the help provided by ispell-region?  You could
> either:
 > [...]

ispell-region is an even better example than Flyspell on what is wrong 
with a lot of Emacs modules:

- When I press '?', the extended help message disappears after a few 
seconds, while in the middle of reading it.

- The wording "exit" and "quit" is ambiguous.

- The difference between exiting with 'x' and 'X' is not clear from that 
message.

- I cannot type 'C-u M-$' to resume spell-checking, because Ctrl+U is 
mapped to something else on my config, and I cannot get M-$ to work 
anyway with my German keyboard. Or maybe because Alt+4 ('$' is on the 
'4' key) is mapped to something else. Who knows.

- I do not understand why I have to learn so much to use ispell-region 
anyway. Why should I enter some "recursive edit" mode or read so much 
documentation? I should just move the cursor around and fix spelling, as 
usual. If I go out of the region, and the mode stops, I could understand 
that. Or maybe if I cannot get out of the region until I quit the 
"spelling mode". But the rest is too much.

- The way to get further help, that you mention, is typing "x C-h f 
ispell-help", which is so long I forgot when the help text disappeared 
before I finished reading it anyway.

But now you mentioned it, I looked at the help. It's awful. It feels 
like vim. There is even a "Redraw screen" command! How can you say it is 
"very convenient"???

I guess we could start a new bug about ispell, couldn't we?

But I feel like I overstepped my time budget with Emacs spell-checkers 
this year. So I'll leave it at this point.

Regards,
   rdiez