Subject: bug#68663: Unsaved buffers dialog is unhelpful

From: Nikolay Kudryavtsev <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2024 23:37:25 +0300

Hello.

Ever since 29.1 there's been a regression in user prompts when closing 
Emacs with multiple modified buffers. Now user only gets 3 options:

- Close without saving

- Save all

- Cancel

In 28.2 and earlier, for every buffer, the user would get the prompt 
asking to save the file and the following options:

-Yes(save the file)

-No(don't)

-View This Buffer

-View This Buffer And Quit

-View Changes in This Buffer

-Save This Buffer But No More

-Save All Buffers

-No For All

I would argue that, while the old dialog may have been over-complicated 
in terms of user options, the new dialog is useless. The only two 
options available are the ones that a reasonable user would never use. 
So he has to press cancel and then lets hope he knows about M-x 
save-some-buffers.

While restoring the old dialog would certainly be an improvement over 
the current situation, maybe some options should be trimmed from it to 
avoid overwhelming the user with too many options and maybe the whole 
thing should be ported to a minibuffer prompt(made into a front-end over 
save-some-buffers). It's 2024 and we no longer have to pretend that the 
90s GUI conventions are the future.

I can see that there's been some debate over this on emacs-devel, back 
in 2022:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2022-01/msg01727.html