"Roland Winkler" <wink...@gnu.org> writes: > On Sat Sep 5 2015 Roland Winkler wrote: >> On Thu Sep 3 2015 Eric Abrahamsen wrote: >> > Basically it does what it says: if point is on a record name, the >> > whole record is copied, like before. If point is on a particular >> > field, the value (but not label) of that field is copied. >> >> I am just trying to understand a typical usage pattern for the >> extended code. I understand that it can make sense for a single >> record to grab the value of only one field. Yet what would this be >> good for with multiple records? It seems to me that with multiple >> records, this would make sense only if it included also the name of >> the record. > > One more thought: Why treat names special? The only field, where it > appears to make sense to grab its value from multiple records > without including some "identifier", would be the name field. > > Then, treating all fields the same way might work best with a > separate command bbdb-copy-field-as-kill instead of extending the > functionality of bbdb-copy-records-as-kill. The prefix arg could > then possibly be used in a different way: with prefix arg the > command could also grab the name field. (Or: include the name field > whenever this command operates on more than one record?)
Yup, I asked myself many of these same questions, and I'm not really sure why I settled on the current behavior. All I really need is a quick way to copy and share addresses, phone numbers, and mails from my contacts -- usually just one, and I don't need the name attached. Beyond that, I'm happy to work this however seems most useful. Your last suggestion seems as good as anything I could come up with: why don't we do a separate function that only copies fields. If the name was included automatically when copying multiple records, then the prefix arg could be saved for selecting members from a list value, like it does now. Mostly that's useful when people have a million different email addresses. E ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
