Subject: Re: bug#50950: "(emacs) Mark" should contrast to "selecting" text in other editors

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2021 01:01:21 +0200

Den fre 1 okt. 2021 kl 21:44 skrev Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>:
>
> > From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
> > Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2021 21:31:22 +0200
> >
> > Severity: wishlist
> >
> > The section '(emacs) Mark' starts with saying:
> >
> > "Many Emacs commands operate on an arbitrary contiguous part of the
> > current buffer."
> >
> > This makes it sound like this is an unusual, super advanced feature,
> > when in the rest of the world this is just known as "selecting text".
> > We should avoid the words "arbitrary" and "contiguous" which, while
> > accurate, comes off as extremely highbrow for such an extremely basic
> > feature.
>
> I disagree that the region is a basic feature.  It may look
> deceptively similar to text selections, but it isn't.  We have the
> region, the active region, and the shift- and mouse-selected text,
> which all look similar, and sometimes behave similarly, but they are
> not identical.

IMO, it is not an advanced feature, and on the most basic level it
really is just selecting text.  You want to copy it, make it bold,
indent it, or what have you.

It is of course precisely what makes it different that needs to be
explained.  But this can and IMO should be done by starting out from
what is already known.  For example, where we now have:

  Many Emacs commands operate on an arbitrary contiguous part of the
  current buffer.  To specify the text for such a command to operate on,
  you set “the mark” at one end of it, and move point to the other end.

it would be better to put something along these lines:

  In other text editors, you can select text to perform various
  operations on, such as copying or deleting it.  In Emacs, we say
  that such commands operate on the "region".

  The region starts at point, and ends at what in Emacs is known
  as "the mark" ...

  [Note: this a very quick write-up, and not a proposal.]

We don't need to talk about "arbitrary contiguous parts" or anything
like that.  There is no need to pretend as if the user don't already
have a very strong concept of what exactly is a text selection and how
it works: our job is to help the user see exactly where that intuition
fails.

> > We should re-work this section to contrast the unusual parts of point,
> > mark and region to the types of text selection that exists in other
> > editors.  We can safely assume that the latter is well known.
>
> The region and selected text are not identical.  The differences are
> subtle and not easy to explain, but saying that they are the same is
> worse than that, because it will trip users.

See above, this is not about saying that these things are the same.

In any case, AFAICT, the manual doesn't make much of an attempt to
explain this difference as it is, so I'm not sure it is very
important.  I could be wrong, but in that case I think the manual
should try to do a better job at explaining it.  (The only match I can
find for variations of "select" in the index is "mouse, selecting text
using" and that section is talking about the region.)