Christian Tietze has a, for me, provocative post on the Emacs 29.1 kill-buffer prompt. I am a stickler for accuracy and consistency: just ask my family that has to endure my rants about inconsistencies between episodes of TV series. Tietze makes me look like an amateur.
His post laments the change in the kill-buffer prompt in Emacs 29.1. It used to be something like “Buffer modified; kill anyway? Yes or No”. Emacs 29.1 added a third option: “Save and then kill”. His problem is that the “Yes” or “No” answers are now ambiguous. At least as far as his muscle memory is concerned.
Tietze advised the kill-buffer--possibly-save function to change the prompts to:
- Save and kill buffer
- Discard and kill buffer without saving
- Cancel. Exit without doing anything
These prompts have the advantage of being consistent and clear. Still, almost all of us won’t care. We may grump that the prompt lacks consistency but we’ll adapt. Tietze is different and fixed things to be more rational.
The point of this Irreal post is that Tietze’s post is an allegory on the ability of Emacs to let you have it your way. Tietze could have just sucked it up and dealt with the new prompts or he could have filed a complaint to, say, Emacs-devel and hoped that he wouldn’t be ignored. Instead, he simply fixed it in his own environment and wrote about it in case others or the Emacs developers wanted to do likewise.
To me, this represents the best about free software. Not only do we have the source code but it is, in fact, easy to modify Emacs’ behavior without recompiling the app. I don’t know of any other app with this level of adaptability.