Subject: bug#72862: 29.1; Strange interaction between append-next-kill and kill-whole-line

From: Sean McAfee <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2024 22:13:06 -0500

On Sun, Sep 8, 2024 at 1:56 AM Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Since kill-whole-line kills both backward and forward from point, it
> seems we should expect that the first part is prepended to previous
> kill, whereas the second part is appended.  Which is what the command
> already does.
>
> WDYT?
>

Since the current behavior is explicitly documented in the code, I suppose
that settles it.  I really can't imagine a good use case for it, though.
But then again, until I filed this ticket, I didn't know that
append-next-kill could sometimes prepend instead of append.  It seems a
small miracle that I've never stumbled across the prepending function by
accident.

Perhaps kill-whole-line does technically kill both forwards and backwards,
but to me it's always been just a welcome shortcut for the classic Emacs
idiom C-a C-k C-k.  And the name kill-whole-line certainly implies to me
that the line is killed as a single unit, not killed in two steps in
opposite directions.  If the current behavior is to stay, then I think it
could stand to be called out explicitly in the documentation for
kill-whole-line.

Anyway!  Although I'd prefer to see what I'd consider to be the more
sensible behavior built into Emacs, I can achieve it on my own by just
rebinding C-S-backspace to a command that moves to the beginning of the
line before calling kill-whole-line.