Matt, Thanks for your reply.
I have been attempting the (x)emacs way of selecting text as you describe and I agree the functionality is similar but I find it is not as easy for me to remember. All I needed to remember in MultiEdit was that the cursor keys worked, the control key made them go further and the shift key caused selection. The Control xc and v are easy to remember due to their logical position together on the keyboard. >From looking at sample.emacs it appears relatively easy to change the Ctrl-W (I ask you W meaning cut - someone has a sense of humour) to Ctrl-X and the same for Meta-W and Ctrl-Y (yank! = horrible name for inserting text). That leaves me with getting used to Ctrl-Space (which is a long way from the cursor keys) unless I can get the shift to replace it. > Well... I find mouse cut'n'paste with Unix easier than windows. If I > wanted to select the quoted text above, I would use mouse button1 (my > left-most button), press it, and drag the mouse over the text I > wanted. Upon releasing the mouse button, the region should remain > highlighted. The fact that in Unix if I select text and then press delete (or any key) and it does not disapear seems really odd. Also the fact that it is too easy to get text into the paste buffer - by that I mean highlight with your mouse, and then accidently click the middle button and you paste it, I prefer to make an extra step to select, then copy, cut, delete or paste and so control what goes in the paste buffer. I definately do not want to start any kind of flame war on this. I believe that our preferences here are simply due to the what we learnt first (the best block support I have ever used was in MultiEdit on msdos). I also believe that as (x)emacs is so very customizable that it should be able to support both our preferred way of working. The only dificulty is learning how to do the customization. > I don't know if this is the default behavior -- I have the gpm package > installed, and that may be what does this for me. (On the other hand, > I compiled xemacs 20 withOUT gpm support, and this still works... > <shrug>). gpm has caused me problems so I disabled it. I have a MS Intellimouse on a PS/2 port. This works fine with gpm unless I have run X then the mouse goes crazy back in a virtual console with it automatically selecting text and moving erratically. > Good luck! Thanks. Dave