[Mageia-discuss] emacs text selection

[Juergen Harms]

Preparing to change distros - go to Mageia - I am reviewing some of my 
"laziness based habits" and try to migrate from xemacs to emacs. No 
fundamental problem, but I hit a weird aspect:

When, in emacs, I select a region of text and than type a character, I 
expect (and have the habit) that the newly typed character would replace 
the entire selected region: no, when the character is typed, emacs 
de-selects the region and inserts the character (i.e. appends it) after 
the region.

Is this a known and accepted particular aspect of emacs (practically all 
other text editors I know replace a selected the region when new text is 
typed)? is there a standard way in emacs to configure emacs to "behave" 
as expected? if not, are there established key bindings which allow to 
make emacs behave like other editors?