Subject: Re: bug#33855: 27.0.50; Can't see markup in HELLO

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 May 2022 14:56:43 -0400

Eli Zaretskii [2022-05-20 18:49:04] wrote:
>> Maybe a more explicit one, like `C-x h M-x write-region`?
> Yuck!  Users shouldn't need to use that command.

At least, for this user here, it is what I would do if I ever needed to
do that (and I think it's a fairly rare occurrence).

>> I can't see any part of my above recipe which says that the user (me in
>> this case, I was just trying things out, tho admittedly I disabled
>> `enriched-mode` via the menu on the "Enriched" word in the mode line
>> instead of via `M-x enriched-mode`) intended to remove the annotations.
> That's what Emacs understood:

I know but it very much surprised me, so I expect it could surprise
other users just as well.  Maybe `enriched-mode` should prompt the user
to confirm that this is what they intend.  And if they don't intend
to do that, it could do what `enriched-toggle-markup` does.

Similarly when enabling `enriched-mode` if it notices that the buffer is
already in a valid format for decoding, it could prompt to decide
whether to do the `enriched-toggle-markup` in reverse or to convert
the buffer to enriched-mode like it currently does.

> disabling Enriched means you give up on saving the faces and the other
> annotations,

I don't see any reason why the user should expect that.  Obviously some
users (e.g. you) would expect that, but since it throws away information
it seems better not to make such an assumption.

Usually our priority is to avoid throwing away information unless the
user says so explicitly and I don't think that disabling a minor mode
can be taken as a request to throw away information.

> because Emacs never does that.  E.g., if you save a buffer in CC mode
> with all the faces set by font-lock, you don't expect the file on disk
> to have any traces of those faces, right?

I think this assumes too much knowledge on the part of the user about
how `enriched-mode` works internally.

        Stefan