Subject: bug#43847: ERC - prevent yanking multiple lines into IRC (feature request) *patch*

From: Corwin Brust <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2020 20:32:54 -0500

Hi Brett!  Thanks so much for the reply!

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 11:56 AM Brett Gilio <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> Corwin Brust <[email-masked]> writes:
>
> > I hate it when I accidentally paste multi-line text into ERC.  I
> > *never* actually intend to do this.
> >
> > This patch provides erc-yank and binds it to C-y for erc-mode buffers.
> > This does the same as `yank'; however, the text is unfilled (collapsed
> > to a single line) before it is inserted.
> >
> > It might make sense to have a defcustom to get back the old behavior
> > but I haven't included that.  This is my second attempt at sharing a
> > patch for Emacs; I sent one about an hour ago.  I believe, taking both
> > patches together, I should be pretty close to the max for tiny-change.
> > I've started the copyright assignment process.
> >
> > All feedback gratefully received :)
> >
>
> A possible alternative behavior could be somewhat similar to what CIRCE
> does, but may be more intensive to implement. CIRCE, when pasting
> multiline content offers to send the content to a paste-service, and
> then kills the URL to the buffer and sends that instead.

This is a wonderful suggestion.  Speaking for myself, personally, I'd
like to see it as somewhat of a secondary behavior, what sending a
prefix arg does, or something.  In any case a very fine feature,
indeed.

A quick perusal of CIRCE[1] (which looks lovely), suggests the present
approach there involves having various paste-services explicitly
supported.  Perhaps this could be implemented in terms of a
def-paste-service macro, of some sort.  I would expect some amount of
discussion may be involved in selecting an initial service or services
to support, as it were, of the the box.  Maybe that conversation would
be approprite to Emacs devel, in case this feature would be
interesting to a more general cross-section of users vs ERC/IRC.

> What if we had a paste.emacs.org that ERC could utilize here?

I think that's an excellet idea in several regards.  In addition to
simplifying, potentially trivializing the decision of what service to
support, it also leads to a bunch of links getting shared around which
point into the fsfverse.  It's a tiny bit of mind-share, but I'd be
inclined to take it.  That said, having a "branded" paste-service
"baked in" to Emacs would seem to me to stengthen the argument to
formalize the interface for people to setup their own; to make ours
easy and others hard would be very off-brand.

This is something I'd be happy to work on, but I'm not how we would
approach something like requesting a http facing new service, going
forward.

> Just a thought.

As I hope I made clear, I love it.

I'm tempted tho, to suggest we might move forward with my more trival
suggested change in the mean-time.

It seems like having something special at C-y in `erc-mode' is
probably on the road-map for any of this, and may make live easier for
ERC users somewhat more quickly than some of the other ideas discussed
so far can move.

> Brett Gilio

Regards,
Corwin