There are historical reasons for pretty much all default settings. For example, you said:<p><pre><code>    &quot;e.g. commands that act on regions should act on lines when no region is selected&quot;
</code></pre>
This is because traditionally Emacs never had the concept of &quot;no region selected&quot;. The way it Emacs works is that it has two markers: &quot;point&quot; (which is just the cursor) and &quot;mark&quot; which is another position somewhere in the buffer. You can set the position to mark to that of point by pressing C-SPC. In fully traditional mode, the position of mark nor the selection is ever actually displayed in the buffer. If you press C-x C-x, the locations of point and mark are swapped, allowing you to quickly jump to mark and then back again.<p>The way Emacs was (and is) designed to work is that all region-based commands simply apply their function on the characters between point and mark. Since there isn&#x27;t any &quot;selection&quot; as such, talking about what commands do without the selection simply does not make sense.<p>Now, in (what I consider to be) a misguided appeal to users of &quot;windows style&quot; editors, Emacs introduced the concept of &quot;active regions&quot;. The underlying concept of having a point and mark is still there, but there is now also a flag indicating whether a region is &quot;active&quot; or not. Commands can look at this flag to perform different operations whether or not this is the case. Since several years, active regions has been enabled by default in Emacs.<p>The problem when having active regions enabled is that in many cases the user has to reactivate the region before performing some operations, making many region-based operations much more complicated[1] to use.<p>I seem to have become to the go-to person for Emacs support at my workplace, and I have seen a lot of new users being confused about regions in Emacs. Instead of adding even more Elisp code to try to coerce the application into behaving more like Notepad, I typically recommend them to turn off active regions and learn Emacs the way it was meant to be used. It&#x27;s certainly different from most other editors, but the behaviour makes a lot more sense once you pick it up.<p>Footnotes:
[1] I used the word &quot;complicated&quot; to mean &quot;needs more keypresses&quot;.