Re: Gather a list of confusions beginner tend to have

[Praharsh Suryadevara <praharsharmm@gmail.com>]

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I think that could be one reason why. A friend set me up with a starter kit
later. Before that, I made a few attempts at vanilla emacs and gave up and
I did not realize CUA mode existed until yesterday.
I understand it'd be much more helpful if I remembered the details, but
it's been a while and I'm used to and very happy with the emacs defaults
now. A more useful method would be to put a friend/colleague who's never
used emacs in front of vanilla emacs and observe them figure it out (I'm
sure some of us may have put them in front of it already).

The point I believe in is, *It possible to make emacs easier for new users
to be able to start working in emacs from the beginning without sacrificing
any functionality for old users*
This need not come from changing the defaults, but rather from a startup
wizard or a profile which *sets the bindings/preferences according to what
the user wants.*
This is useful *because a new user won't know enough e-lisp to make the
editor do what he/she/they can work with.*

As for startup wizards, I was talking about what Yuan was proposing (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_(software)), a series of dialog boxes
that would introduce new users to emacs and give them a setup that they
could work with.

@tomas While I understand your point, I think there's a difference between
switching from emacs to vim/ vice versa (I don't complain about vim
keybindings after using emacs and I wouldn't expect people to complain vice
versa) and a new user who's only used C-x and C-c for cut and paste for all
their life being exposed to emacs (or vim).

@Eli As for options for the configuration wizard, If I were to assume I was
the audience being targeted when I started (an early 20s physics undergrad
who wrote basic python and wanted a good LaTeX editor), I think I would be
minimally happy with CUA mode with some basic AUCTeX setup. Maybe, some of
the minimal options would be easy to flesh out?


Thanks,
Praharsh




On Wed, Sep 9, 2020 at 9:24 AM Göktuğ Kayaalp <self@gkayaalp.com> wrote:

> On 2020-09-09 17:18 +03, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > The reason we didn't put these on the splash screen is because we have
> > a menu bar, where everyone can find these popular commands without the
> > need to read any instructions.  Who will not know nowadays that to
> > open a file, one need to click on "File" and look in the menu that
> > drops down from that?
>
> It looks like some of the starter kits / distributions are disabling
> menu and toolbars.
>
> We might ask them that they at least don’t disable menu-bar-mode by
> default if that’s the case.
>
>
> --
> İ. Göktuğ Kayaalp / @cadadr / <https://www.gkayaalp.com/>
> pgp:   024C 30DD 597D 142B 49AC 40EB 465C D949 B101 2427
>

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