Subject: bug#8083: cua global mark does much more than it announces

From: Kim Storm <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2021 11:06:08 +0100

On 20/01/2021 18.54, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Lennart Borgman <[email-masked]> writes:
>
> However when cua global mark is set quite a few other things also
> happens. For example self-insert-command is remapped so that the
> character you type is inserted at cua global mark.

Yes, that is by design.

The main purpose of the global mark is that you can use it to easily 
reorganizing code.

First you set the global mark to the place where you want to move some code.

Then you successively "mark and move" various pieces of code to the 
global mark (and advance the mark).

Typically, while doing this, you would want to add some "separation 
text" between the pieces of moved code, like whitespace, commas, or 
newlines, and that is why "self-insert" is remapped to insert at the 
global mark.

Quirky but useful :-)

> (I'm going through old bug reports that unfortunately got no response at
> the time.)
>
> I've now adjusted the doc string to also mention inserted text in Emacs
> 28.
Thank you!
>> I think also that this desing is not good . It is surprising to an
>> uninformed user and it interferes very badly with viper for example
>>
>> Kim, could we please remove this? Or do you have another suggestion?

I guess we could make an option to disable that specific feature of the 
global mark.

Kim