Re: Some developement questions

[Ergus <spacibba@aol.com>]

On Sun, Aug 26, 2018 at 05:52:14PM +0200, hw wrote:
>Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>> From: hw <hw@adminart.net>
>>> Cc: spacibba@aol.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>> Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2018 03:31:18 +0200
>>>
>>> >> (setq Man-width 75)
>>> >
>>> > Emacs nowadays calculates the width dynamically, depending on the
>>> > dimensions of the window.
>>>
>>> Why not make Emacs dynamically size it's windows to the width of the
>>> display first? ;~O
>>>
>>> <Rant>
>>>
>>> Yes, Emacs can do that since a while, and has made it an extremely
>>> annoying default.  Who wants to read manual pages or other text when it
>>> has been formatted to be about 140--300 characters per line wide (and
>>> way more than that if my eyes were what they used to be)?
>>> [...]
>>> This is a good example for a default that really should be changed.
>>
>> Feel free to file a bug report about it.
>
>Hm, ok, I did that (no response yet).  Let's see what happens.
>
>>> Think of what Ergus pointed out in his last post[1] about the
>>> difficulties users and Emacs are experiencing:
>> [...]
>>> + get nothing to work
>>
>> I agree that practical steps towards helping new users is something
>> that are very welcome.
>
use-packages can make the life much more easier handling dependencies in
a way that it is not so esoteric to understand the configuration. I
can't understand why melpa/elpa configuration is not default in
emacs. Same for use-package. So new users can find no so cumbersome
adding a new package in the documentation, as well as migration between
machines.

I thing there should be also an emacs tutorial centered only in text
editing, because the basic tutorial is too simple in that field. The
vim's tutorial is all about editing (obviously), but it gives a lot of
hints and keybinds to move/edit faster or associate keys with
actions. There are some keybinds in emacs that I discovered almost by
accident, same with some commands which names are a bit tricky.

>How about getting new users in the first place?  Ergus is right that
>Emacs is not the default editor --- I always have to explicitly install
>it and it always annoys me that it isn't installed by default for any of
>Centos, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora.  Ubuntu and arch probably don't have a
>good default, either.

Ubuntu has vim, nano, ed and all the others, but nor emacs. Arch on the
other hand has nothing by default, but manjaro also has vim in all it's
flavors.

>Instead, you always need to guess which editor
>might be installed unless you installed one, and that is usually at
>least vi, which I don't get along with.
>

>I wouldn't know how to sway who ever decides what is being installed by
>default in any of these distributions to make Emacs a default.  One
>reason for it not to be the default may be that it makes for somewhat
>large packages maybe.  It is questionable if that should still be a
>concern nowadays.
>

I am relatively new in this, but in general if we ask to the people who
maintains those distributions it will be not a big issue to include
emacs in the defaults packages in the future, the restrictions came from
the times when they where restricted to 700Mb for the distros. But I
think that we must make some changes for the first impression
first. Talking to gnome, kde or the other is something doable too.

Vim for example provides a vimrc personalized per distributions to
integrate itself better in the environment.

>Imagine that, it may even be the only reason.  And it remains that way
>only because nobody thought about it yet.
>

Probably that's it. But we could change that with a couple of arguments and emails.

This is also an indication that most of the maintainers in these projects are
using vim (or something else) and not emacs.