Sometimes an Emacs command isn’t sure what to do next. Any person who went beyond the tutorial will instantly recognize the (yes or no) prompt commonly associated with potentially destructive actions, such as saving files.
I happen to work at a place where the majority of programmers prefer using Emacs and even manage to convince new employees to give that hell of a text editor a try. One day one of my colleagues asked me for help because they couldn’t understand why clicking a button when installing a package replaced the familiar (yes or no) prompt with a modal dialog for this and every other action.
A cursory look at the sources of the yes-or-no-p function revealed what was going on:
DEFUN ("yes-or-no-p", Fyes_or_no_p, Syes_or_no_p, 1, 1, 0, doc: /* Ask user a yes-or-no question. Return t if answer is yes, and nil if the answer is no. PROMPT is the string to display to ask the question. It should end in a space; `yes-or-no-p' adds \"(yes or no) \" to it. The user must confirm the answer with RET, and can edit it until it has been confirmed. If dialog boxes are supported, a dialog box will be used if `last-nonmenu-event' is nil, and `use-dialog-box' is non-nil. */)
Everything just went according to plan.
Fortunately this quirk can be disabled:
(setq use-dialog-box nil)
After explaining what happened to my bewildered colleague, I felt like dismissing this whimsy behavior for just feeling like an interface improvement that got tacked on as afterthought, however it turned out to be far more dangerous than that for users of a popular commercial Unix operating system.
Not even the shortened y-or-n-p variant is safe!
;; ¡Beware! when I tried to edebug this code, Emacs got into a weird state ;; where all the keys were unbound (i.e. it somehow got triggered ;; within read-key, apparently). I had to kill it.
But it’s more featureful than plain old yes-or-no-p[1], so I’m fine with someone leaving a most certainly obsolete bug report in its sources instead of just using the bug tracker.
| [1] | Apparently most of its code was written to allow one to scroll around in the buffer from where the prompt was invoked without leaving it, a feature shared with the query-replace command. |