I realized today that the behavior of killWord from XMonad.Prompt is surprising to me. In particular, when you iterate killWord, it deletes first a word, then a space, then the next word, then the next space, and so on. I (an emacs user) expect killWord to delete a word AND any whitespace that happens to come before it. (Hmm... I tested with vim and it seems that 'dw' deletes a word along with any TRAILING whitespace. So emacs and vim differ here... but the point is that killWord emulates neither.) I looked into it and it turns out that the behavior of killWord is even sillier than I thought. It deletes an entire word of non-whitespace characters *or a single space*. (So if there are multiple spaces you have to call killWord once for each space before you finally get to delete the word that comes after.) And if the next character is a tab it doesn't delete anything at all! For concreteness, here's the change I made: diff -rN old-XMonadContrib/XMonad/Prompt.hs new-XMonadContrib/XMonad/Prompt.hs 525,528c525 < delNextWord w = < case w of < ' ':x -> x < word -> snd . break isSpace $ word ---
delNextWord = snd . break isSpace . dropWhile isSpace
Thoughts? If anyone really likes the old behavior then I can make two versions. Or if there is consensus that the old behavior is silly and the new behavior is better, then I'll just push the above change. I could also be talked into swapping the order of the break and dropWhile in order to emulate vim; I don't really care as long as it's one of the two. -Brent