It seems quite clear to me that given the semantics of Emacs' file-open there can never be a happy choice between New and Open. This is because in the CUA world these operations have clear implications about the existence or non-existence of the argument object.
New and Open have readily understood and internalize failure semantics. Users do not view such failures as inefficiencies or a lack of DWIM in the interface. They experience it instead as a confidence building feature: either their expressed intent is successfully carried out or they receive an indication of a failure. OTOH Emacs' file-open offers no way to express such detailed intent. Instead it smears the distinction that separate New and Open present. One solution might be to add an optional tri-valued argument to find-file: CLASSIC, NEW, EXISTING. /john _______________________________________________ Emacs-devel mailing list Emacs-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-devel
