Some people keep classic flames alive to deploy in times of need. Theo's good, but he can't hold a candle to the late Marc Cripsin railing about emacs line-mode-visual. Grr.

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1tf1iy/imap_inventor...

>From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs

>What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea to make line-move-visual be the default in emacs 23? I just found out about this charming "improvement" in the worst possible way. Investigation determined that a "routine" software update had just installed emacs 23 and gave me this "improvement".

>People wonder why everybody hasn't dumped proprietary desktop software. This is an example why. Emacs' line behavior has well over 30 years of history, and some bagbiter goes and changes it BY DEFAULT.

>Add all the cute new features you want. But leave the goddamn defaults alone.

>If you want to have your own playpen where you twiddle defaults to your hearts content, have at it. But don't pretend that you produce software for a production environment, and stop telling the Linux distributions that they should "upgrade" to your "improved" versions. People doing real work depend upon those distributions.

>It does no good to say "read the release notes" when the affected users don't get the release notes and don't even know that a new release happened. It is also unreasonable to expect users to subscribe to every obscure newsgroup, forum, and wiki to hear about changes that will turn their expectations upside down.

>Yes, I fixed my .emacs file. And I'm putting in the same change to all the .emacs files on all the dozens of other machines I use, even though they still have emacs 22, because otherwise this unpleasant surprise will repeat itself over and over again.

>Grr.

>From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs

>They made the wrong decision. Changes to default behavior are a bad idea. Changes to default behavior of the most basic functionality are an extremely bad idea.

>I don't care if M-X fart-noisily-with-spray changes its default scent from skunk to lemon. But I damn well do care about the most basic operations: all CTRL single letter and ESC single letter. After 33+ years of using emacs, I expect these to be reliable and not suddenly change.

>I wasted hours trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my file, or my terminal emulator window, or my system. The fact that the problem went away on a different system added further confusion. It was only when I did ESC <n> CTRL/N and saw that it moved me the wrong number of lines, but only on one system, that I realized that emacs changed. And that's when I did ESC X describe-key CTRL/N and read about line-mode-visual, although it did not mention that this was now the default.

>Surprise. Grr.

Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)