miswart

/mis-wort/ [By analogy with misbug] A feature that

superficially appears to be a wart but has been determined

to be the Right Thing. For example, in some versions of the

Emacs text editor, the "transpose characters" command

exchanges the character under the cursor with the one before

it on the screen, *except* when the cursor is at the end of a

line, in which case the two characters before the cursor are

exchanged. While this behaviour is perhaps surprising, and

certainly inconsistent, it has been found through extensive

experimentation to be what most users want. This feature is a

miswart.

[Jargon File]