Re: longtime user of emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2020 15:10:34 +0800
> Cc: "andres.ramirez" <rrandresf@gmail.com>, Jeff Norden <jnorden@tntech.edu>,
>  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Some thoughts:
> 1. The link to the tour in the welcome page is not easy to spot for a
> new user. There is too much information. I might be better to show it by
> default on first startup after installation.
> 2. Currently, the tour is one long web-page, which is not very easy to
> read. I imagine that a presentation-like style (with prev/next buttons
> on each page) showing one concept at a time would be easier to read.
> 3. The tour may as well include interactive customisation. For example,
> 'Migrating to Emacs' part of the tour may as well contain a clickable
> element to turn on CUA mode by default.
> 4. The tour might ask user questions if the user is going to work with
> source code, email, web-browsing, shell, etc. If the user is not
> planning to work with certain things, they may as well be hidden from
> menu and customisation pages. By hidden I don't mean completely hidden,
> but rather "folded" - the user should be able to show them back.
> For a newcomer, Emacs offers very too many different options. I believe
> that it makes more sense to restrict the customisation and menus to what
> user explicitly plans to do. It should be already more than enough to
> start learning.
> 5. Similar guided tours may be created for most popular Emacs features:
>    - working with source code
>    - org-mode
>    - version-control and collaboration
>    - remote file access
>    - mail
>    Those tours might also offer some initial customisation, so that the
>    user may disable/enable some features which are not relevant to
>    his/her workflow.
>    The guides should be easily accessible from menu.
> 6. Some new users might be confused by default file open dialogie
> involving mode-line. I believe that similarly to CUA-mode, Emacs can
> emulate more standard approach by offering dired as a way to open files
> (not enabled by default, but offered as a customisation together with
> CUA-mode).

Thank you for writing this.  I would encourage interested people to
work on some of these ideas.