Emacs (unlike most IDEs) doesn't unpredictably and non-deterministically mis-interpret your keystrokes when you type ahead by sluggishly popping up completion dropdown at random times that change the interpretation of subsequent keystrokes, forcing you to concentrate your entire attention on the screen, type slowly, and wait for the timeouts to expire and popups to draw before reacting to them.

I learned Emacs at 300 baud, so I'm very used to its ability to perfectly support predictable type-ahead.

Also, it was a terrible for Emacs to make "line-move-visual" be true by default, because it ruins keyboard macros.

Xah Lee disagrees and thinks line-move-visual is great, and rants and raves about it, but his arguments don't convince me. However it was a nice try, and I admire his dedicated Emacs fanaticism, even if we don't agree on the (important!) details.

He didn't address the problem that line-move-visual ruins the usability and determinism of keyboard macros, and I think keyboard macros are so important that fucking them up (especially in the service of making Emacs act more like Microsoft Word, which wasn't designed to support keyboard macros) makes Emacs unusable. I strongly agree with the late Marc Crispin's classic flame and followup discussion on the subject. (Search for "M-X fart-noisily-with-spray".)

http://xahlee.info/emacs/emacs/emacs_line_move_visual.html

>This page discuss a new feature in emacs 23.1, that pressing the down arrow key moves cursor to the next line as seen on the screen, not by EOL (end of line character), controlled by the variable line-move-visual.

>[ Mark Crispin ] [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Crispin ], inventor of the email IMAP protocol, one of the earliest user of emacs (before Richard Stallman), posted a message on newsgroup comp.emacs, aggressively attacking a emacs 23.1 change about how the key C-n or arrow keys move the cursor across lines. The thread now has over 110 messages. The original thread is here comp.emacs, some later messages are posted to gnu.emacs.help.

>In his opinion, emacs should not have changed this fundamental behavior. Here are some of my responses in the thread, summarizing why i think it is a good change.

He quoted both Mark's flame on comp.emacs and mine on hn:

http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/Don_Hopkins_Mark_Crispin_rants...

>Rants on Emacs Visual Lines by Don Hopkins and Mark Crispin

>by Don Hopkins, 2013-12-21

>The wrong people have been drunkenly driving Emacs into the ditch for the past decade or so, and they're really screwed it up in so many ways, usually trying to be way too clever and solve problems that really aren't worth solving.

>They made “line-move-visual” the default, which in the service of making Emacs behave more like Microsoft Word, it makes ^N and ^P across wrapped lines stay on the same line and move to the part of the same line that is wrapped above or below the cursor, totally breaking type-ahead predictability and keyboard macros. That totally pissed of the late and long time Emacs user Marc Crispin, and he explains why it's such a terrible idea that breaks keyboard macros: http://compgroups.net/comp.emacs/line-move-visual/274792

>It totally breaks keyboard macros, one of the most important things about Emacs. It definitely should not have been made the default, since keyboard macros are a way of life for real emacs hackers. I totally agree with Marc's take on the problem, and I am terribly disappointed that RMS let somebody get away with changing it that way, and making that horrible mode the default.

>They just can't stop trying to make it more like Microsoft Word, while failing to actually achieve that goal, and only succeeding in inflicting half-assed solutions with harmful unpredictable side-effects on the users.

[...]

http://xahlee.info/emacs/misc/Mark_Crispin_emacs_line_wrap_r...

[...]

>From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs

>They made the wrong decision. Changes to default behavior are a bad idea. Changes to default behavior of the most basic functionality are an extremely bad idea.

>I don't care if M-X fart-noisily-with-spray changes its default scent from skunk to lemon. But I damn well do care about the most basic operations: all CTRL single letter and ESC single letter. After 33+ years of using emacs, I expect these to be reliable and not suddenly change.

>I wasted hours trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my file, or my terminal emulator window, or my system. The fact that the problem went away on a different system added further confusion. It was only when I did ESC <n> CTRL/N and saw that it moved me the wrong number of lines, but only on one system, that I realized that emacs changed. And that's when I did ESC X describe-key CTRL/N and read about line-mode-visual, although it did not mention that this was now the default.

>Surprise. Grr.