Subject: bug#51167: 29.0.50; org-indent-line broken

From: Kévin Le Gouguec <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2021 11:01:01 +0200

Andreas Röhler <[email-masked]> writes:

> On 13.10.21 09:34, Kévin Le Gouguec wrote:
>>
>> "Modern" did not factor in; the goal was to have RET and C-j behave
>> consistently in all major modes.
>
> That does not deliver an argument to change the meaning of RET.

If there is a compelling argument that justifies RET and C-j behaving
differently in Org wrt other major modes, I haven't heard it yet.

> BTW the costs of such changes are terribly underestimated in Emacs.

AFAICT, the costs of user-facing changes are regularly discussed on the
Emacs development lists, and different developers have different
opinions on how underestimated they are.

In the specific case of RET and C-j, I'd argue (and Org maintainers seem
to have agreed) that the long-term benefits of Org falling in line with
other modes outweigh the short-term costs of annoying long-time users,
especially since they are offered ways to bring back the previous
behaviour (outlined in ORG-NEWS).

And in the specific case of org-adapt-indentation, again, changing the
default to nil was the result of extensive discussion on emacs-orgmode,
where several users explicitly stated that they did not want text to be
indented (neither with RET, C-j, TAB, nor org-indent-line) and never
realized that org-adapt-indentation was t because Org ignored
electric-indent-mode before 9.4.

>> Since electric-indent-mode is enabled globally in Emacs,
>
> Which IMO was another mistake.
>
> Preferring a clean editor, which does fancy things only if enabled.

There are plenty of things Emacs does by default that I personally find
unhelpful; fortunately I can just disable them.  And as long as release
notes point out changes in default behaviour (and how to revert them),
I'm happy with new releases enabling new features.

YMMV 🤷