Dear Emacs people: Please just quit shoveling us crap without an opt-IN.
I've spent weeks considering the proper punishment for people who shovel you new 'features' which turn themselves on automatically and ruin the flow of work. Since I jumped on a RHEL6 box - wow; there's a whole series of things I can write about the wrongness that is RHEL6 - and fired up an actual editor, you'll guess I mean the new crap in emacs without having to remember the title.
(if you're a vi freak, stop reading now. I outgrew that 1.5-dimensional rinky-dink keypress mess in 1993)
The problem isn't the new stuff, because I like some new stuff if it's a help. The problem is that the work flow is holy, and we need time to assimilate changes to it without it being an irritant. What's the irritant today? Conf mode. I'm sure it's great, and I'm sure it'll be awesome eventually, but its behaviour is different, and instead of adding a snippet to the startup text suggesting I try it for this given text file (and maybe offer a switch-once/switch-always command) the mode I'm using to quickly edit a file causes the cursor to jump around.
I don't want it to jump around without my leave. I mean, as long as I understand the operator/terminal relationship anyway. *I* control *it* by default.
Now to get the behaviour I need at work, I've cruelly hacked out the mode's startup, because the alternative of vapourizing the auto-mode-alist has an even bigger crater than excising the mode in a crude, sick fashion. Someone tell me how to use the (remove) to remove all the conf-mode entries and/or show me where someone's hacked in the kind of feature banner above, and I'll love you forever and update this page.
Here's the diff:
--- /root/.emacs~ 2011-10-30 05:00:45.000000000 -0700
+++ /root/.emacs 2013-09-15 14:28:40.000000000 -0700
@@ -372,3 +372,7 @@
;; fix fucking new emacs' addition to fucking horizontal fucking splitting. fuck
(setq split-height-threshold 0)
(setq split-width-threshold nil)
+
+;; fix fucking new emacs' addiction to fucking conf-mode. Double-fuck.
+(defalias 'conf-space-mode 'text-mode)
+(defalias 'conf-mode 'text-mode)
And seriously, emacs devs: sorry to rant, but adding new features and fucking with the flow is like a despicable pop-up banner on the web you just can't close. It could not be more annoying if you also enabled at the same time.
