Re: CUA-theme?

[Thibaut Verron <thibaut.verron@gmail.com>]

>     Daniele> If I understand correctly the recent discussions, one of the main goals
>     Daniele> is to make Emacs more accessible to newcomers. In this respect, are we
>     Daniele> sure that using the "theme" concept, associated (outside the Emacs
>     Daniele> world) with customizing how applications looks, to configure the
>     Daniele> application behavior is a good idea?

I couldn't agree more.

>     Daniele> Reportedly, one of the things that newcomers struggle with is the
>     Daniele> peculiar and unique jargon used to describe Emacs concepts. This would
>     Daniele> add one more. I think the concept of "mode" as something that changes
>     Daniele> application behavior is well established and easier to explain.
>
> Except you then engender confusion with the Emacs concept of
> modes.

Only in the sense that it is more restrictive than the Emacs concept.
For example, cua-mode, delete-selection-mode and evil-mode are Emacs
modes and also application-behavior modes. I don't think there would
be a major confusion here, as by the time users see other modes, they
would be more used to Emacs terminology.

> Perhaps we should call them 'user type profiles' or something,
> then we could call them 'new-to-emacs-profile', 'vanilla-profile', etc.

That's also fine, but it might create confusion with user profiles,
which would typically cover *all* the settings, so that different
profiles would have different init files. That actually opens another
area for investigation: we could have Emacs support such user profiles
and have the configuration screen offer a choice for a "base profile"
(some kinds of factory settings).