Re: Apologia for bzr

[Sivaram Neelakantan <nsivaram.net@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 06 2014,Stefan Monnier wrote:

>> On the other hand, I’ve showed emacs to a very large number of new college
>> students over the years, both programmers and non.  The keybindings are
>> confusing to many people. People who accidentally split-window are very
>> confused.  Nobody was ever confused by the location of the modeline, and it’s
>> normal for common apps like web browsers to have a “Status Bar” down there. 
>
> That corresponds to my experience.  The main sources of trouble, AFAICT are:
> - window management:
>   - how to get rid of a window (e.g. when *Help* introduced a split).
>   - how to get back to a buffer that was somehow buried.
> - keybindings like C-a, C-x, C-c, C-v
> - naming (things like windows, frames, kill, yank).
>

Speaking as an Emacs user,  I don't understand this line of
reasoning.  The same logic above could be applied to vi/vim, any
programming language at all.  I ran into the same issues above and I
got help from this list or from the docs and even rereading the
tutorial.  What's the issue with new users nowadays?  All the
definitions are there in the manual...erm...somewhere but there.

Back in high school in India, I took French as an optional language to
learn.  Flunked badly.  And my teacher had only one thing to say to me

"Stop thinking in your native language when learning another language"

which I think is the only way to gain a reasonable fluency in using
Emacs i.e. learn Emacs concepts/terminology before proceeding.  And
the Tutorial is more than adequate for the purpose.


 sivaram
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