Could somebody please explain to me what the idea behind the new concept of
"visual lines" in Emacs is?

Emacs has always been a "line-oriented" editor, i.e. the buffer consists of
logical lines. These lines can occasionally wrap so that they spill over to
the next visual line, but the main concept is still the logical line. This has
been the mindset of Emacs users since the dawn of time.

I was shocked to find out that this doesn't seem to be true anymore: by
default C-n and C-p do not move to the next and previous logical lines, but
instead place the cursor on the next or previous visible line. I find this
totally counterintuitive. If I press C-n five times, I expect to find the
cursor five (logical) lines down, regardless if they happen to be wrapped or
not. It is not consistent either: why don't C-a and C-e then move to the
beginning and end of the visual line. Or why does C-k kill until the end of
the logical line, and not the visual line?

Yes, I know the old behaviour can be restored: after some digging I found out
about the line-move-visual variable. Couldn't the default be nil instead of t?

Please do not forget what Gnu Emacs stands for: Generally Not Used, Except by
Middle-Aged Computer Scientists. With changes like this you risk alienating
the few of us that are left.

Johan Myreen
Emacs user since the mid 1980s