On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 4:49 PM, John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> wrote:

> >>>>> "PE" == Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:
>
> PE> I like the idea of having Emacs defaults being closer to what
> non-expert
> PE> users expect.
>
> I too like the thinking behind this change.
>

​An extensive amount of work in making Emacs and XEmacs more approachable
to new users was done years ago and was involved enough to warrant a new
name, InfoDock, essentially a turnkey version of XEmacs, though many
features were compatible with Emacs.  InfoDock also was helpful to
experienced users/software developers who wanted features automatically
exposed and easy to find when needed.  I was the primary author.

To have a look just at the extensive menubars and popup menus, see:

https://gist.github.com/rswgnu/b714e01d84f715dedc741f695dda4522
<https://gist.github.com/rswgnu/b714e01d84f715dedc741f695dda4522>

That work stopped in 1999 but the core concepts are just as usable today
and the code is still available at:

<goog_220641172>
https://sourceforge.net/projects/infodock/files/InfoDock/4.00.08/

One a tgz archive is unpacked, b​elow the infodock/id-lisp/infodock/
directory are the id-menus.el and id-menubars.el files shown in the gist
above.​

An experienced Emacs Lisp developer could get the menus of InfoDock working
as an alternative menu-UI within a week I would think.  The easymenu.el
package runs XEmacs menus pretty well, I think.  Then just update commands
as necessary.  Then people could evaluate it and see whether it is worth
adding as an option to Emacs.  The menubars themselves provide a button
that allows switching between default menus and InfoDock-style ones.  I
have assigned my Emacs code to the FSF, so the copyrights would just need
to be updated.

So instead of making small incremental changes that have small impacts,
there is a way to make major improvements fairly quickly.

Bob