Subject: Re: bug#78474: 31.0.50; Wrong char insertion in rxvt

From: Seb Hinderer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2025 18:15:14 +0200

Eli Zaretskii (2025/07/21 18:47 +0300):
> > Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2025 17:37:02 +0200
> > From: Samuel Thibault <[email-masked]>
> > Cc: Seb Hinderer <[email-masked]>,
> > 	Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>, [email-masked], [email-masked]
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > Robert Pluim, le lun. 21 juil. 2025 16:53:34 +0200, a ecrit:
> > > I honestly donʼt know if the performance optimization makes any
> > > difference these days,
> >
> > I don't think it will be actually measurable by any mean. The
> > optimization we are talking about saves transmitting one byte while
> > making the terminal interpret one more character sequence (tab+backspace
> > vs arrow-right). In the common case of running emacs in a terminal, I'd
> > rather guess that the overhead of the additional character sequence
> > interpretation is most probably way more expensive than the transmission
> > of an additional byte.
>
> There's no interpretation.  The bytes are sent and executed by the
> video driver.  Using tabs can save several spaces or several bytes of
> a cursor movement command, and that is not a trivial difference.
>
> So let's please not argue about this.

Well I must say I remain unconvinced (1) about how trivial or not the
difference is and (2) about, even non-trivial, whether it outweights the
burden for users of accessibility technologies.

> We can only turn this feature
> on by default if Emacs can tell, with a sufficient degree of
> certainty, that a screen-reading software is in use.  Otherwise, users
> will need to enable this manually.

One possibility might be if distirbutions have a way to configure once
and for all whether accessibility isneeded and then Emacs' configuration
could select its default based on that.

For the sake of completeness of this discussion, Samuel may want to
share a link on a discussion that happened in the context of the Debian
installer. The topic being discussed there was that visually impaired
people need n audible Beep to know whenthe boot process is done andthey
can tyep an 's' to maketheinstallerspeak. Understandably, havingthe beep
turned on by default was deemed annoying by those testingthe installer
whichwas beepingallthe time. In the end, it was accepted to let the beep
on by default because it was considered that its inconveninece for the
testers was less problematic than the burden it represented to turn it
on for those in need for it, thetrick being to plug a headset to the
computer while testing the installer. Samuel will hopefully correct me
if anything I write is wrong or inaccurate.