Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date)

[Michael Matthew Toomim <toomim@cs.berkeley.edu>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Well, yes and no.  Terje seemmed to say that he didn't want to read the 
> manual, period.  Not even a single section, not even when in bad need of 
> some specific information.  That sounds extreme to me: if there's a way 
> of getting quickly to the necessary info, why should someone refuse to do 
> that on purpose?

I think this is the crux of the disagreement: you seem to imply that 
this issue is a matter of desert.

What the above paragraph implies, is that you think Terje doesn't 
deserve to use the cool features in XEmacs, or that we should not feel 
obligated to make the features easier to use, if he is not willing to 
put in the effort required to read the XEmacs manual.

I think that this is missing his point.  Terje isn't complaining to us 
that he can't use the features; he is trying to show us how to get more 
people to use XEmacs.  He is showing us that there are certain barriers 
to entry that don't need to be there, and that these barriers cause a 
lot of people to miss out on the power that XEmacs provides.

Whether the general mainstream audience has put in enough effort to 
really *deserve* to use XEmacs isn't the issue here.  The issue is 
whether or not XEmacs has the best UI that it could have.

Michael