From: Conrad Schneiker/Austin/Contr/IBM <schneik@...>
Date: 2000-11-15T10:18:44+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:6375] Re: What would a Ruby browser look like?

Charles Hixson writes:

# The "auxiliary programs" I was referring to are primarily editors.  Many
# editors will break a double-click selection at any non-alphanumeric
# character.  Some are customizable, but many aren't.  So unless there is 
a good
# reason why the parts of the name would frequently be selected 
separately, I
# would prefer that underscores
[not be used in Ruby identifiers].

That's an interesting reason. I have never encountered that problem. 

But maybe this is because I generally do click and drag (which is fast and 
easy on high-res monitors with small fonts, and because more often than 
not I need to select one or more neighboring characters) rather than 
double clicking (which I personally find obnoxious to use with any 
frequency). Perhaps this is because of working on platforms where shell 
scripts, Perl, and so on have long supported underscores_in_names. xterms, 
gvim, and even notepad and Lotus Notes on NT all seem to do the (IMHO) 
"right" thing. I did find a couple of counter-examples though, 
notably/ironically, Lotus Word Pro and Netscape Composer, but I think 
these are infrequently used for Ruby programming. :-)

Have other people encountered underscore-related editing problems? What 
does emacs do in this case?

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)