Subject: bug#43489: [PATCH] Don't signal scan-error when moving by sexp interactively

From: Mattias Engdegård <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2020 13:21:07 +0200

20 sep. 2020 kl. 23.39 skrev Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>:

> I think that is certainly the case, as a multitude of discussions on emacs-devel has shown.

Unfortunately yes, but what else can we do than trying to improve matters little by little? We will probably fail, but at least we have tried.

> There are no counterparts to this in other editors, so there's no real usability research, and we don't really know which approach is the most usable.

Other editors have structural movement commands although they may or may not behave identically. However, it is a common pattern almost everywhere else that verbal messages aren't displayed unless needed to convey useful information; Emacs is the clear outlier here. There is no reason to believe why one special kind of movement commands in Emacs would warrant error messages (but only sometimes).

> I'd really prefer we examine both and make a considered choice, rather than add a user option.

Very much agreed!