I would suggest interested parties take a look at the "dashboard" package for emacs; it seems to be quite popular amongst those "starter kits" that were discussed earlier, and has iterated around the sort of features we're talking about here. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we just integrate it wholesale, although if people are interested, I'd be willing to try to ask the author(s) about doing so. More details can be found here:

https://github.com/emacs-dashboard/emacs-dashboard

If anyone would like, I would be willing to send them a copy of the information from that page, so they can avoid the github burden; just let me know.

~Chad

On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 6:22 AM Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> wrote:

On 28.04.2020 09:36, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Cc: stefan@marxist.se, jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org,
>> emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
>> Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2020 00:29:17 +0300
>>
>>> "Open a File", "Open Home Directory", "Customize Startup".
>>
>> Two things.
>>
>> First: the first two items duplicate the toolbar items, so they're
>> pretty unnecessary.
>
> Some of the links Stefan did keep are also such duplicates. Any
> reason for treating them differently?

I'm not sure which ones you mean. The rest are _also_ duplicated in the
menu bar, but only the two of the removed ones are present on the toolbar.

In any case, the justification is that the result looks better. And we
can get away with that because these buttons are not essential.

> The Subject says "welcome screen", and you yourself use "startup
> screen". So I thought this is what we were talking about.

That's what we should be talking about, yes.

> If you ask me, the About display is much less important than the
> startup/welcome/splash screen. I very much doubt newbies look at the
> About display; they almost always look at the startup screen at least
> once.

Agreed.