Terry, Thank you very much for the clear articulation of the problem, it enable me to see what the issue is and find more and deeper issues with the change.
Speaking as someone who was not affected by this change due to the peculiarities of my config, let me say as a fairly impartial participant, this change is completely broken and it is clear upstream Emacs did zero due diligence on the impact it would have for org-mode. The current implementation of elastic-indent-mode is obviously broken for use in org. What do I mean? Currently, electric-intent-mode t is actively destructive in certain cases. Consider a headline created by *-space or M-ret. If you then hit return (because you don't know what to call that headline but have the idea you want to type) electric-intent-mode will delete the trailing space making it no longer a headline!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT?! This is horrible broken behavior in org mode! At the very least this must be fixed if electric-indent-mode is to be on by default in org-mode. It is clear that electric-indent-mode as implemented, is unsuitable for use in org-mode since it actively ignores significant trailing whitespace. The sane thing to do is to revert to electric-indent-mode nil at least until the obvious brokeness is fixed, and even then, why make people undo a stupid computer decision by typing backspace when they can just as easily do what they mean by typing tab!??! We don't even have to poll the community to figure out who is going to be forced to type more. I don't mean to sound ungrateful to the folks who have worked to match with upstream, but it is clear that upstream has done zero testing on the impact of that change on org-mode (or any other mode for that matter). Until the upstream behavior can be fixed or org can patch the brokenness this needs to be reverted. Even then, why is the "smart" option that changes the meaning of the bloody return key enabled by default? I will point back to https://orgmode.org/list/87ees6fp8r....@nicolasgoaziou.fr/ and state that had I spotted this thread at the time, I would have spoken up to point out that it would likely not be a welcome change, as this thread shows. The good news is that all is not lost and now when users want electric-indent-mode in org it will be consistent with upstream. Best, Tom
