A couple of months ago, I wrote about Charles Choi’s post on Emacs defaults. Choi had a list of defaults with which he disagreed. I agreed with him on some of list and disagreed on other parts. It was, though, an interesting post and I even learned something. Now Sandra Snan over at Idiomdrottning has her own list.
Mostly, it’s hard to argue with her about the list or her suggested replacements. The only exception is one that I doubt any Emacs user would agree with: Ctrl+h, she says, should be a backspace instead of an entry to the Help system. Yes, her rationale makes sense. It is, after all, the ASCII character for backspace but No True Scotsman Emacser is going to agree with her on this one.
The rest of her list makes sense to me. She considers:
- Placing of backup and autosave files in the current directory.
- Copying a backup file rather than moving it.
- Spaces ending a sentence.
- Indentation using TABs and spaces.
- Requiring a final newline in a file.
frame-inhibit-implied-resize.- Showing trailing whitespace.
- Killing the whole line.
As I said, most of these seem non-controversial to me except spaces ending a sentence. The proper number of spaces after a period ending a sentence is a battle that rages within and without the Emacs community. Irreal has plowed that ground many times so I won’t belabor it here.
Take a look at Snan’s list and see what you think. Perhaps you’ll decide to change some of the defaults on your own system. Regardless, Emacs, as always, lets you have it your way.