Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

At the end of the day though, it's emacs.

In lisp alone, you can get the old behavior back if you want it.

I think usability decisions like this are one of the harder things to decide by committee in an open source project because they are, at the end of the day, questions of taste. And people can have conflicting and equally valid tastes. Here, a swap is being made between editing speed and accuracy, with the one perhaps having the better claim for purely historical reasons (but if you let historical reasons dictate design, you end up with faster horses not cars).

Me personally, I'm a committed emacs user and I don't have skin in this game. If I don't like the new UI, I'll just add the necessary code to swap it out for the old UI.




This is equivocating. It’s not better for purely historical reasons, it’s just a bad trade of speed for accuracy. If you really want to be sure, is one return click enough? Maybe it should be two. Maybe a mouse click. You could throw in a five second cool down to be really sure. Obviously some of these ideas are worse than the status quo.


I don't dispute that two or more clicks or a mouse press would be a bad trade-off of speed for accuracy.

Why is one press of the enter key a bad trade-off of speed and accuracy besides "It's never been that way before?"


These are high speed actions and usually all home-row. The return hit increases the time a significant percentage. They’re also easily undone, so the cost of mistakes is low.

Imagine needing to hit return every time you ctrl-v. Really no point when ctrl-z is available.


Well the good news is it should be straightforward to customize the old behavior back for people who don't like the trade-off.


It should be, but the change didn’t have it as a setting.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: