Emacs is amazing. I stopped using it a few years ago because I became lazy to keep my configuration and extensions up-to-date.
I was also extremely bothered by the fact that the cursor cannot live outside the current viewport and scrolling the buffer would drag the cursor as well. At the time, it seemed impossible to fix because of the way Emacs works, and the solution was something like "you are using it wrong - you need to use marks instead".
But I would love to go back to it, to be honest. VSCode is very good, but Emacs is a whole other level of automation and convenience.
> I was also extremely bothered by the fact that the cursor cannot live outside the current viewport and scrolling the buffer would drag the cursor as well.
I can see how that would be annoying. I can also see why the developers might not have noticed. When I'm in Emacs, I tend to navigate using the keyboard, which means I scroll by moving the cursor and dragging the viewport with it.
So they probably added the ability to scroll without moving the cursor so Emacs would have the feature. But if they never really used it, they wouldn't have noticed the shortcomings in their implementation.
Sorry for the rambling, not sure if I really had a point to make ;)
If well configured, mouse support can be handful when navigating code. There is a niche editor called Acme[1] that is almost "mouse-only", where even Return won't put you in the next line :)
When using Emacs, my workflow was very keyboard-centric, but sometimes navigation was a pain (even with tags and whatnot).
> Emacs is amazing. I stopped using it a few years ago because I became lazy to keep my configuration and extensions up-to-date.
> But I would love to go back to it, to be honest.
What helps me not get bogged down in versioning, is to let someone else deal with it.
For example, Debian and NixOS each package many Emacs packages. I just use their versions, and treat it like any other piece of software managed by the OS.
Alternatively you could try things like Doom, which I think handles versioning.
Unfortunately, that's not what OP wants. What OP wants is that when they scroll, the position of the cursor remains at the same position in the buffer (the contents), even when that means that it leaves the currently visible screen.
What scroll-preserve-screen-position determines, is whether the point/cursor stays at the same visual position in the screen — i.e. if for instance your cursor was in the middle of the screen, it will stay in the middle when you scroll.
OP needs the currently non-existent scroll-preserve-buffer-position.
The lack of "scroll-preserve-buffer-position" has been a very minor pet peeve for me for multiple years, and for some reason this very simple solution just never occurred to me.
I can't believe I didn't think of this. I'm already using marks to keep track of position when I scroll, it's just all manual right now.
I'll likely mess around with some hooks in my config this weekend and see if this is actually feasible, or if it comes with caveats I'm not seeing right now. I guess it would need to account for multiple windows open into the same buffer too.
I'm convinced the edge cases will dominate this code, but the general idea seems straight forward. If you get this working, please share. Not something I think I want, per se, but I could be mistaken on seeing it work. :)
"Instead of setting the mark in order to operate on a region, you can also use it to remember a position in the buffer (by typing C-<SPC> C-<SPC>), and later jump back there (by typing C-u C-<SPC>)." -- https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Se...
Sure, but then every time the user does anything that might scroll the point off the screen, he has to remember to C-<SPC> C-<SPC> first. Installing a new habit that has to activate before such a wide range of editing operations can take a lot of time, during which the user is less productive because part of his attention is devoted to installing the new habit.
You're right. In practice I usually C-/ (undo) C-g / (redo) to get back to where I was; which is something you can do after you've lost your place in the file, but it assumes to previously made some change in that location.
I was also extremely bothered by the fact that the cursor cannot live outside the current viewport and scrolling the buffer would drag the cursor as well. At the time, it seemed impossible to fix because of the way Emacs works, and the solution was something like "you are using it wrong - you need to use marks instead".
But I would love to go back to it, to be honest. VSCode is very good, but Emacs is a whole other level of automation and convenience.