Emacs, use Delete key to delete selection

Question

First of all, this is not a dup of

• how to delete region with [delete] key in emacs, which is for Emacs 23, and the answer is Emacs cua-mode.
• How configure delete-selection-mode to only delete?, which is for Emacs 22, and the issue is not reproducable.

I'm talking about the Emacs Delete Selection Mode, I used to be able to delete selection of text by just pressing Delete key. I found my proof here.

In order to set emacs to delete the selected text when you press DEL, Ctrl-d, or Backspace, add the following to your .emacs file:

(delete-selection-mode t)

However, now, with my Emacs 24, the Delete key doesn't work on the selection anymore (only Backspace does). This is really annoying because for all editors that I use, pressing the Delete key will delete the text selection. I don't understand why Emacs has to be so different and inconvenient. Anyway,

Any easy way to fix it? I don't know whether the comment of the following was a joke or the actual solution:

(setq behave-like-something-actually-usable-by-humans t)

Thanks

PS, my Emacs 24 is from nightly build:

$ emacs --version | head -1 
GNU Emacs 24.3.50.1

EDIT: The answer from Drew, if it is unclear to you (I got that on third attempt),

(global-set-key (kbd "<delete>") '(lambda (n) (interactive "p") (if (use-region-p) (delete-region (region-beginning) (region-end)) (delete-char n))))

works for me.

Answer 1

The <delete> key is bound by default to kill-line. It sounds like you want to bind it instead to delete-region. Just do it.

(global-set-key (kbd "<delete>") 'delete-region)

Answer 2

There appears to have been a change to the behavior of delete-char. I experienced that as well as I had bound DEL to that command. I had success binding the key to delete-forward-char instead, which implements the old behavior. See here.

Answer 3

In 21.4.22, I had to use the (region-active-p) function instead of (use-region-p)

(global-set-key `backspace '(lambda (n) (interactive "p") (if (region-active-p) (delete-region (region-beginning) (region-end)) (delete-backward-char n))))