An anonymous IRC user's opinion

An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

I was asked to relay this from an anonymous IRC user. The words below are not
mine. I, Jordi, did not write this. Someone wanted to post this anonymously to
emacs-devel, and I'm doing it on their behalf.

Thanks,
Jordi

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I discovered emacs recently through david wilson videos, I configured
emacs from scratch, and I wish I knew what emacs is or what it can do
long time ago, I want to share with you my experience as a new user as
I hope this will help you in some way or another, and to propose
something.

I always had on my mind that emacs is yet another editor/IDE, and on
top of that is very complicated and very special to use, and on top of
that it does many things at the same time. All these things, plus the
ease of use of other choices, plus the lack of time to dig into emacs,
made me always chose quick alternatives, and I ended up using many
editors/IDEs but never tried emacs.

Until I saw david videos, then I understood what emacs really is. The
complexity of emacs first configuration did not discouraged me at all
knowing that I will have a working setup at the end that I needed, and
if needed too I can add more setups later, and I can even hack emacs
if also needed. I can tell you about the endless debugging of the init
file for even the smallest error (without any clear diagnostic about
the error), and I can tell you all the times I lost many works when
doing "undo" because I did not know that emacs is not like any other
editor out there, until I searched on the internet for this "new"
behavior which I thought it was a bug, and then tried to stick with it
for some time, until I discovered undo-tree, and this list goes on and
on and on...I think you all know that and all went through the same
very long path.

So I was wondering why emacs is like this and why it is difficult to
configure and make it run quickly, at least to test it if it suites
someone needs, before diving deeper inside. it is the oldest out
there, yet it is still the most difficult to start with.

For example, some years ago I had to work on a small typescript
project, I quickly found vscode.

I downloaded it in 5min, and it took me 5 clicks to install a plugin.
and then I had a working typescript setup.

And then I used vscode like I if I had been using it for a long time,
whereas it was my first time.

Other than this example I can give a lot of the same experiences, so I
can easily imagine how many people out there are easily diverged from
emacs.

Another point is that I wanted to share my discovery with my
surrounding, and setup emacs for them so they can start using it.

If I want to encourage them to use it and read the manual, and live
the same experience I had to configure emacs, they would have cursed
me forever, and this is not even possible for non-dev people, and if I
want to make the configurations myself for each scenario, It will take
me forever, and even for some scenarios I need to know if this is
possible or not and discover new customizations/packages/etc.

The first thing I thought about is a pre-configured init file for each
scenario, that people can easily shared/distribute, but I quickly
thought it was a very bad idea. so I asked my question on
#systemcrafters IRC channel, and someone pointed me to this link
https://emacs.amodernist.com/ which I think is a very good start and
the nearest answer to what I was going to propose, thought it has many
drawbacks, for example user will not understand what is going on and
why he needs to go to a different site to config a software that he
installed locally on his machine, and what he needs to do next to
relate the config to emacs, what an init file is, and even user may
not trust a foreign website to generate code for him to run on his
machine, user also tends to escape any long "boring" reading material,
etc.

What I am proposing is to make this possible in emacs or at least in a
trustworthy environment in an easy, quick and attractive way.

I am not proposing to change anything in emacs, but to add a new
separate feature which I think is very useful.

To Make emacs up and running with a useful configuration in a
reasonable time, for almost every situation/scenario for everybody.

I am also not asking to change emacs defaults, every user will have
the configuration he wants/needs.

For example:

I am a prof and I want to edit org markup only. (I dont need anything
else)

I am a writer or I write a lot: articles, books, blogs, mails, I need
dictionary auto-complete + spellchecking only (nothing else)

I am a c++ dev and I need to quickly work on a small c++ project.
(nothing else)

I am a school teacher, and I need to organize some stuff with org
agenda only. (nothing else)

I am a scientist, and I need to write some formal documents and share
them in different formats. (nothing else)

I am a student and I need to take notes in a zettelkasten style
(nothing else)

I need an IRC client (nothing else)

I am an emacs user, I already configured emacs for myself using this
feature, and now I also need to configure emacs with one of the above
scenarios for my sister, my brother, my parent, my friend, my
neighbor, my college, my coworker, my teacher, my student, etc.

I think many of you one day found themselves in a similar situation.

There are countless use cases out there, and emacs can cover almost
anything for anybody.

Many of emacs hackers may end up using it for many things, but new
users would discover/start using emacs for one thing (which they
actually need at the moment) and later they will use it for another
thing, yet another thing, yet another thing... if needed.



I am not necessary asking this feature to be added to emacs itself, it
can be a separate GNU ELPA package project (to start with before maybe
adding it to emacs later), but as you will see below, I think it is
better to be part of emacs.



I have an idea of the implementation, but I hope it will not distract
you from the main idea above.

I am giving you the implementation so you can better understand what I
am talking about (no more).

It is then up to you to decide if this is feasible or not, and if this
implementation is pointing in the right direction or not.

So this is just an implementation detail, and only the main idea above
should be retained.

This can be implemented by for example having as first page an
attractive org file, which introduces user to emacs
vocabulary/environment in a very short words and time (5 to 10min), by
for example clicking on some org links like:

[[elisp:(call a function to color the modeline)][Click here to see the
modeline]]

[[elisp:(call a function to color the echo area)][Click here to see
the echo area]]

[[elisp:(call a function to color the minibuffer)][Click here to see
the minibuffer]]

[[elisp:(call a function to color the minibuffer)][Click here to open
a window on the right]]

etc...

and the same goes for the toolbar, menubar, buffer, window, frame,
message buffer, error buffer, and only things the user need to know to
start using emacs, nothing else, only vital things, not to overwhelm
or discourage user.

For example users should not be introduced to keybindings at this
stage, they are not vital to use emacs, they complicate things for
user and may discourage him, he only need to use copy/paste and
undo/redo which are universal, and the menubar is fair enough for
everyone just like any other software (the menubar already contains
keybindings to be discovered, yes emacs is very well done).



Then there is a link that say for example "Start configuring emacs",
which is basicaly a Q&A config style:

Do you want to try emacs undo style or use undo/redo style ?

Do you want to use emacs undo keys or use ctrl-z/ctrl-shift-z
undo/redo keys(cua) ?

Do you want to auto-save modified file in emacs ? yes/no

Do you to backup files edited in emacs ? yes/no

Do you want to save/remember the windows positions ? yes/no

Do you want to save/remember the cursor position in visited files ?
yes/no

Do you want to save/remember recently opened files ? yes/no

Do you want to highlight the current line ? yes/no

Do you want to configured org mode ? yes/no

Do you want configured IRC ? yes/no

Do you want to have auto-complete from dictionary ? yes/no

Do you want to save/remember frequently used words ? yes/no

Do you want spell checking ? yes/no

Do you want to auto-complete from words in the opened buffers/files ?
yes/no

Do you want to have auto-complete for a programming language ? yes/no

What programming languages (C++. python, ...) ?

etc...

For the last question for example, better not ask user if he wants to
install eglot even if he is a developer (better always suppose that he
is a new user first, so he may not know anything about eglot. So
better use general terms whenever possible).

All the questions should have a default answer (which are basically
the current emacs defaults) so if the user hit enter all the way down,
nothing should happens (this will also be a way for users to discover
and have an idea of what emacs can do)

User can come back later and repeat this step as much as he wants (the
new default answers will be the user previous answers, so hitting
enter all the way down should also do nothing, and with this user can
have an idea of what he had already answered/configured for certain
things)

If this results in a ton of questions, then maybe a selection of what
should be asked or not is to be done, or maybe a second org link can
be added for example: "Detailed/Advanced Configuration".

Of course there should be "leveled" questions (questions should be
grouped and not presented as flat list like in my example list above),
for example if user chose not to configure org by hitting "no", no
further questions should be asked about org. The top level questions
should be as few as possible and as generic as possible.

Everything should be configured in a reasonable time or so.

Running this later will be much more quicker for user (only the first
time will be somehow a discovery).

Without the user having to know about init file, packages, archives,
functions, variables, hooks, and endless init file debugging, or even
to write a single line of elisp.

Users can be from different backgrounds not necessary hackers or
developers.

But this feature is not only focused on non-hackers and
non-developers, hackers and developers will benefit from this as well
at least as a starting point, before digging into emacs later, or for
example to configure emacs for a friend,etc in a quick way, as stated
at the beginning.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eduardo Ochs]

On Wed, 2 Oct 2024 at 02:41, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <jordigh@octave.org> wrote:
>
> I was asked to relay this from an anonymous IRC user. The words below are not
> mine. I, Jordi, did not write this. Someone wanted to post this anonymously to
> emacs-devel, and I'm doing it on their behalf.
> (...)


Hi Jordi, Anynomous, and all,

my problem with Anonymous's proposal - here:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2024-10/msg00018.html

is that I don't know how it would be developed and what its prototypes
would look like...

Suppose that we develop a small script that would change startup.el to
add a button that would open a beginner's page in Org that would
initially have, say, only two lines of text and Org links with
"elisp:" actions. Would Anonymous be willing to a) run that script on
his/her/their machine? And b) then run that script on some friend's
machines to see if they find that button too hard to find and too hard
to click on?

Let me write "A+Fs" for "Anonymous plus friends", "Chiyaab button" for
the button in the startup page that says "Click here if you are a
beginner", and "Beginners page" for the page that that button points
to.

I am especially interested in the "degree of pollution(*)" of elisp
code. I know that for some people having something like this in a
tutorial,

  To understand what is the init file click on _this button_, or,
  equivalently, execute the elisp code below by moving the point to
  its line and typing C-e C-x C-e:

    (info "(emacs)Init file")

...makes that tutorial completely unsuitable for beginners - and I
would like to know how numerous these people are, and learn more about
how they think.

  Cheers,
    Eduardo Ochs
    http://anggtwu.net/eepitch.html
    http://anggtwu.net/#eev


(*): I was rereading Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble" some time ago,
and it has this quote, taken from Mary Douglas's "Purity and Danger":

  ...pollution powers which inhere in the structure of ideas itself
  and which punish a symbolic breaking of that which should be
  joined or joining of that which should be separate. It follows
  from this that pollution is a type of danger which is not likely
  to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social,
  are clearly defined.

     A polluting person is always in the wrong. He [sic] has developed
  some wrong condition or simply crossed over some line which
  should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger
  for someone.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> writes:

> is that I don't know how it would be developed and what its prototypes
> would look like...

While I’m not the anonymous, I see something similar when I look at the
marketing of IntelliJ: they have PyCharmm, WebStorm, and so forth, which
are mainly different flavors of IntelliJ.

From that I could imagine a similar approach to provide different
installers that install a pre-configured Emacs for the specific task.

On distributions that may mean providing meta-packages which install
required elpa-packages and are started from a script that prepares a
$HOME/.emacs.d/ for the specific flavor of Emacs if it does not exist
already.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eduardo Ochs]

On Fri, 4 Oct 2024 at 15:10, Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab@web.de> wrote:
>
> Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > is that I don't know how it would be developed and what its prototypes
> > would look like...
>
> While I’m not the anonymous, I see something similar when I look at the
> marketing of IntelliJ: they have PyCharmm, WebStorm, and so forth, which
> are mainly different flavors of IntelliJ.
>
> From that I could imagine a similar approach to provide different
> installers that install a pre-configured Emacs for the specific task.
>
> On distributions that may mean providing meta-packages which install
> required elpa-packages and are started from a script that prepares a
> $HOME/.emacs.d/ for the specific flavor of Emacs if it does not exist
> already.

Hi Arne,

I think that Anyonynous is saying that we need a variant of one of
these specific flavors... a variant that has an extra button - "Click
here if you are a beginner" - in the startup page.

  Cheers,
    Eduardo Ochs

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> writes:

> I think that Anyonynous is saying that we need a variant of one of
> these specific flavors... a variant that has an extra button - "Click
> here if you are a beginner" - in the startup page.

Do you mean something like an improved first time tutorial?

We have something there, but maybe it does not match user expectations
anymore?

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eduardo Ochs]

On Fri, 4 Oct 2024 at 16:25, Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab@web.de> wrote:
>
> Do you mean something like an improved first time tutorial?
>
> We have something there, but maybe it does not match user expectations
> anymore?

Hi Arne,

Yes! To be honest Anonymous's proposal doesn't make much sense to
me... for example, this,

> Without the user having to know about init file, packages, archives,
> functions, variables, hooks, and endless init file debugging, or even
> to write a single line of elisp.
>
> Users can be from different backgrounds not necessary hackers or
> developers.

that gives me the impression that Anynymous thinks that people should
configure their Emacs first and learn "the rest" later, and that that
would work very well.

I was able to squeeze out some practical ideas from A's proposal -
like:

  1. let's create a hack that adds a button saying "If you are a
     beginner click here" to the splash screen, and make it well
     known;

  2. let's create a way to make it open a certain Org file;

  3. let's discuss how to make that Org file adjust the user's init
     file according to the settings in its checkboxes;

  4. let's create a way to make that easy to install,

  5. let's ask Anonymous to install that on some friends's machines.

They are probably going to say that our _prototypes_ are crap, that
they needed something much more polished, that did exactly what they
wanted and that didn't contain a single sentence that they didn't
understand... and at that point we can plonk them, but we will have
the code for (1), (2), (3), and (4), and that can be useful in the
future...

  (Slightly bitter) cheers,
    Eduardo

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Hi Eduardo,

Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> writes:

> Yes! To be honest Anonymous's proposal doesn't make much sense to
> me... for example, this,
>
>> Without the user having to know about init file, packages, archives,
>> functions, variables, hooks, and endless init file debugging, or even
>> to write a single line of elisp.
>>
>> Users can be from different backgrounds not necessary hackers or
>> developers.
>
> that gives me the impression that Anynymous thinks that people should
> configure their Emacs first and learn "the rest" later, and that that
> would work very well.

I think they have a point with that. The success of Doom¹ and Spacemacs²
(to my impression many of the new Emacs users in the past decade came
from these) suggests that many users need something that just solves
their current requirements.

Besides having pretty readable online-documentation (with Doom simply
using what github provides), they mostly provide “what is your task? I
will make it work well and look good.”³

¹ https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs
² https://www.spacemacs.org/
³ https://www.spacemacs.org/layers/LAYERS.html#programming-and-markup-languages

But even these are still far too much for casual users — even casual
programmers. Configuring anything before being able to start is often
too much. The JetBrains (IntelliJ) page shows what 

And most current tools are available as curl-bash (curl script from
maybe trusted source and execute it without inspection).

A writer friend of mine (also build system engineer) spent months
collecting neat adjustments to create the perfect writing environment.
That worked, because org already provides much out of the box.

So some way of making custom emacs setups provide the UX of installing a
regular application might actually bring more users.

I’m not sure whether that’s actually the best approach for Emacs, but
something to reduce the friction of getting an emacs setup optimized to
a given task to almost zero would likely be a valuable improvement.

> understand... and at that point we can plonk them, but we will have
> the code for (1), (2), (3), and (4), and that can be useful in the
> future...
>
>   (Slightly bitter) cheers,
>     Eduardo

Please try to keep bitterness off list. I understand the sentiment, but
the times I gave in to bittereness or cynicism myself, it always hit the
wrong people, scaring active new contributors away from the project
(whom I later saw contributing constructively to other projects).

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eduardo Ochs]

On Sat, 5 Oct 2024 at 05:41, Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab@web.de> wrote:
>
> Hi Eduardo,
>
> Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Yes! To be honest Anonymous's proposal doesn't make much sense to
> > me... for example, this,
> >
> >> Without the user having to know about init file, packages, archives,
> >> functions, variables, hooks, and endless init file debugging, or even
> >> to write a single line of elisp.
> >>
> >> Users can be from different backgrounds not necessary hackers or
> >> developers.
> >
> > that gives me the impression that Anynymous thinks that people should
> > configure their Emacs first and learn "the rest" later, and that that
> > would work very well.
>
> I think they have a point with that. The success of Doom¹ and Spacemacs²
> (to my impression many of the new Emacs users in the past decade came
> from these) suggests that many users need something that just solves
> their current requirements.
>
> Besides having pretty readable online-documentation (with Doom simply
> using what github provides), they mostly provide “what is your task? I
> will make it work well and look good.”³
>
> ¹ https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs
> ² https://www.spacemacs.org/
> ³ https://www.spacemacs.org/layers/LAYERS.html#programming-and-markup-languages
>
> But even these are still far too much for casual users — even casual
> programmers. Configuring anything before being able to start is often
> too much. The JetBrains (IntelliJ) page shows what
>
> And most current tools are available as curl-bash (curl script from
> maybe trusted source and execute it without inspection).
>
> A writer friend of mine (also build system engineer) spent months
> collecting neat adjustments to create the perfect writing environment.
> That worked, because org already provides much out of the box.
>
> So some way of making custom emacs setups provide the UX of installing a
> regular application might actually bring more users.
>
> I’m not sure whether that’s actually the best approach for Emacs, but
> something to reduce the friction of getting an emacs setup optimized to
> a given task to almost zero would likely be a valuable improvement.
>
> > understand... and at that point we can plonk them, but we will have
> > the code for (1), (2), (3), and (4), and that can be useful in the
> > future...
> >
> >   (Slightly bitter) cheers,
> >     Eduardo
>
> Please try to keep bitterness off list. I understand the sentiment, but
> the times I gave in to bittereness or cynicism myself, it always hit the
> wrong people, scaring active new contributors away from the project
> (whom I later saw contributing constructively to other projects).


Hi Arne,

you are right - I've tried to learn Doom Emacs to help a friend who
used it and my experience with it was so bad that I tend to forget
that lots of people love it...

To make a long story too short, my friend was trying to use Doom
Emacs, and he was learning a kind of Lisp that was only a
configuration language - only after several months I discovered that
he had plans to learn things like defun and setq someday, but "next
year".

The idea of adding a button for beginners at the startup page and
making it go to an Org page looks like a much better approach to me in
comparison with Doom - and I imagine that it would let people
configure Emacs in a wide spectrum of configurations that would go
from Vanilla to some maximalist configurations with almost as many
packages as Doom, and the Lisp code for that could be much easier to
understand that the Lisp of the Doom configs... but we would need to
start small, and in the process we (or rather: I) would have the
opportunity to understand why lots of people find it exciting to spend
six months playing with configurations, but think that understanding
what defuns and setqs do is something incredibly painful, to be
postponed as most as possible...

Btw, I am the author of this,

  http://anggtwu.net/eev-intros/find-eev-quick-intro.html#2
  http://anggtwu.net/eev-intros/find-windows-beginner-intro.html

that is for beginners and that starts by Lisp. But I need to leave now
- more later.

  Cheers,
    Eduardo

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Eduardo Ochs wrote:

> The idea of adding a button for beginners [...]
>   http://anggtwu.net/eev-intros/find-windows-beginner-intro.html
>
> that is for beginners [...]

What is a "beginner", even?

Why is that concept so central?

We should be our best to all users, it doesn't matter if they
used the software for 10 days or 10 years.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> writes:

> The idea of adding a button for beginners at the startup page and
> making it go to an Org page looks like a much better approach to me in
> comparison with Doom - and I imagine that it would let people
> configure Emacs in a wide spectrum of configurations

I think this is actually the second step.

The first step is figuring out how to foster configuration communities
from core Emacs. How to find out which configurations are there and how
they organize to decide 

>   http://anggtwu.net/eev-intros/find-eev-quick-intro.html#2

This looks like a start, but already deeper in than I’d think. About the
first part (#1, not #2): I think the first command to learn with Emacs
is CTRL-g. You’re stuck in something and want to Get Back to whatever
you did before. Regardless of the strange things happening right now,
stop them.

If something worries you, just hit C-g repeatedly. Even if that didn’t
change the current situation, it gave you time to think, because it
didn’t do anything ☺

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez]

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> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2024 20:10:44 +0200
> From: "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de>
> To: Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com>
> Cc: Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <jordigh@octave.org>,  Emacs development
>         discussions <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> Message-ID: <87y133u4bf.fsf@web.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
Arne writes:
> Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> writes:

>> is that I don't know how it would be developed and what its prototypes
>> would look like...
>...
> On distributions that may mean providing meta-packages which install
> required elpa-packages and are started from a script that prepares a
> $HOME/.emacs.d/ for the specific flavor of Emacs if it does not exist
> already.
>
> Best wishes,
> Arne
> --
> Unpolitisch sein
> heißt politisch sein,
> ohne es zu merken.
> draketo.de

Greetings

Isn't that what some Emacs "impersonations" are doing. You clone a git repo
as your $HOME/.emacs.d and there you are.
Look, for example at https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs#install

My .02 €cents, /PA

-- 
Fragen sind nicht da, um beantwortet zu werden,
Fragen sind da um gestellt zu werden
Georg Kreisler

Headaches with a Juju log:
unit-basic-16: 09:17:36 WARNING juju.worker.uniter.operation we should run
a leader-deposed hook here, but we can't yet

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez wrote:

> Isn't that what some Emacs "impersonations" are doing.
> You clone a git repo as your $HOME/.emacs.d and there
> you are.

What do you mean, they are actually us?

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Abraham S.A.H. via Emacs development discussions.]

Some thoughts about what have been discussed in this topic:

** The plague of pre-configuration:

Isn't Emacs usable without any pre-configuration, out of the box?
I think it is.  One can install Emacs and use it right away as an
editor without any initial configurations.  Emacs — without any prior
customisation and configuration — already provides much more features
compared to many code/text editors that I know and have worked with.

However, current Emacs' vanilla setup is not all of what make most
Emacs newcomers interested in Emacs and/or discover Emacs.  So they
tend to start customising and tweaking Emacs right away, rather than
using it first.  I'm not sure, but I think this tendency is not
something that Emacs devs or community can prevent.  But at least,
Emacs has to say to it to the user that you can use me without any
prior configuration for most of the simple use cases of a text
editor.

Another problem is that most of those newcomers start doing that
without reading Emacs' manual.  Now, that one has to be clearly
discouraged.  Doesn't matter how intuitive an interface is designed,
it's always good to come with a manual, and Emacs comes with a very
good one.  And it's always advised to use a tool after or alongside
reading its documentation.

\f

** The audience of Doom:

I think, Doom and Spacemacs were and are (at least, partially)
successful in attracting:

1. Previous vi, vim, or neovim users;
2. Anyone who likes VI and VIM key bindings.

Amongst whom are beginners or those who don't like to do the required
configuration to achieve a similar look and feel to Doom
and Spacemacs.

However, it is not as much attractive for other people than those.  But still
there are people using Doom/Spacemacs not being from those two groups.

\f

** A wizard to do the magic work:

What about an initial interactive wizard buffer?  Many complicated
software actually come with that.  Prompting user to choose some 
important options and to declare his/her use case and to notify him
about some important tips.

An initial interactive wizard will force a beginner to pay attention
to notes, tips, suggestions, and warning along helping him/her to
interactively configure and prepare his/her Emacs for its first use.

The interface would use a mechanism much like Emacs' Custom buffers.

That would just open for the first time Emacs is opened or such thing.

--
Best Regards,
Abraham
Sent with Tutanota; https://tuta.com

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Abraham S.A.H." via "Emacs development discussions. wrote:

> Another problem is that most of those newcomers start doing
> that without reading Emacs' manual.  Now, that one has to be
> clearly discouraged.

We can assume the opposite, that people will not read it.
I don't know if "everyone" did that in the 70s, in the 90/00s
only the most dedicated guys read books and manuals and now,
we can assume that this is an almost foreign concept to young
people. Why on Earth should you read a book if you want to use
software, what does that have to do with it and why not just
use the software right now?

And while it is good there is documentation, these people
thinking like that are not entirely wrong. I start to agree
with them more and more.

> Doesn't matter how intuitive an interface is designed, it's
> always good to come with a manual, and Emacs comes with
> a very good one.

Those are different things, let's do both as good as we can
and as much energy people feel it is meaningful to put
into it. Improve documentation, improve interface, improve
computation, improve some alternative backend that no one
ever heard of - we take it.

Everything that makes it better and make people active, with
us. Enough with the long period of everyone piling up their
own .emacs - can't have that anymore, there are too few of us
to afford it.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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"Abraham S.A.H." <arash.sah@tuta.io> writes:

> Isn't Emacs usable without any pre-configuration, out of the box?

It is a good editor without any pre-configuration (it even ships
org-mode). But to be a good Web-IDE, C++ or Scheme programming
environment, Server automation plattform, and so forth, it requires
configuration.

Which might be a reason why it is discovered by writers, and why
Spacemacs and Doom capture new people.

> Another problem is that most of those newcomers start doing that
> without reading Emacs' manual.  Now, that one has to be clearly
> discouraged.  Doesn't matter how intuitive an interface is designed,
> it's always good to come with a manual, and Emacs comes with a very
> good one.  And it's always advised to use a tool after or alongside
> reading its documentation.

No. Any software that says that you have to read the manual first is
doomed to fail for most people.

One of the best features of nano is that the important keybindings are
shown directly on the screen. No documentation needed.

We obviously can’t have *no* explanation, but if people have to read
more than an 80x30 screen of explanations, it’s too much.

> \f
>
> ** The audience of Doom:
>
> I think, Doom and Spacemacs were and are (at least, partially)
> successful in attracting:
>
> 1. Previous vi, vim, or neovim users;
> 2. Anyone who likes VI and VIM key bindings.

You miss people who want their editor to look cool. There are a lot of
visiual attractions built right into doom and Spacemacs from the start.

> \f
>
> ** A wizard to do the magic work:
>
> What about an initial interactive wizard buffer?  Many complicated
> software actually come with that.  Prompting user to choose some
> important options and to declare his/her use case and to notify him
> about some important tips.

Once we have a wizard, it becomes even more likely that people will stop
before even starting.

> An initial interactive wizard will force a beginner to pay attention
> to notes, tips, suggestions, and warning along helping him/her to
> interactively configure and prepare his/her Emacs for its first use.

I don’t like the "force" here.

Best wishes,
Arne
--
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

> No. Any software that says that you have to read the manual
> first is doomed to fail for most people.
>
> One of the best features of nano is that the important
> keybindings are shown directly on the screen.
> No documentation needed.
>
> We obviously can't have *no* explanation, but if people have
> to read more than an 80x30 screen of explanations, it's
> too much.

+1 Very much so.

> You miss people who want their editor to look cool.

How it looks is a huge part of it.

And it is not just superficial. We have trained eyes. If it
looks good, it is good. This is like ...
decoded automatically.

So it should be good, and this should be reflected in that it
also looks good.

But you can also put some extra effort to make it look even
better :)

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <paaguti@gmail.com> writes:
>> On distributions that may mean providing meta-packages which install
>> required elpa-packages and are started from a script that prepares a
>> $HOME/.emacs.d/ for the specific flavor of Emacs if it does not exist
>> already.
> Isn't that what some Emacs "impersonations" are doing. You clone a git repo as your $HOME/.emacs.d and there you are.
> Look, for example at https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs#install

Yes, those are pre-configured settings.

Many already exist, but they are not organized, so most users don’t find
them at the start of their journey, and they don’t necessarily
coordinate to specialize for the task they do themselves.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

> One of the best features of nano is that the important
> keybindings are shown directly on the screen.
> No documentation needed.

It is interesting you should say that, because I thought about
that recently when I did this interface:

  https://dataswamp.org/~incal/bad-www/img/studio.png

Note the [h] button that will hide all the buttons if you
don't wat to see them :)

What do you think?

I am full cycle, GUI -> CLI -> TUI.

Tired of typing those long commands, but it was fun while
it lasted. Better just pushing a button. We have a full
keyboard of keys plus shortcuts, that must be enough?

What interface people expect today I don't know and there
seems to be quite some variety in the smartphone app world.
HTML/CSS maybe is prevailing as technology, but I mean how it
looks to the user?

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

>>> On distributions that may mean providing meta-packages
>>> which install required elpa-packages and are started from
>>> a script that prepares a $HOME/.emacs.d/ for the specific
>>> flavor of Emacs if it does not exist already.
>>
>> Isn't that what some Emacs "impersonations" are doing.
>> You clone a git repo as your $HOME/.emacs.d and there you
>> are. Look, for example at
>> https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs#install
>
> Yes, those are pre-configured settings.
>
> Many already exist, but they are not organized, so most
> users don't find them at the start of their journey, and
> they don't necessarily coordinate to specialize for the task
> they do themselves.

We must formulate a theory regarding this and then adopt
a policy which uses the same terminology :)

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Abraham S.A.H. via Emacs development discussions.]

> No. Any software that says that you have to read the manual first is
> doomed to fail for most people.

I think you missed the phrase “or alongside”.  We already know that
one can still use Emacs without reading its manual, though not Emacs’
full potential.

Being well documented is always a great advantage.  And having the
personality to read and consider before action so as well.

Best is to make tools that can be used without reading manuals or
education, as much as possible; while still keeping them
well-documented and well-recorded.

However, most physical equipments (not pieces of software), even very
small or simple ones come with dedicated manuals, which are sometimes
a hundred in pages.  It includes most of the tools that I have in my
home.  Most of them are usable without reading their manual, of
course.  But, if you don’t read the manual, you will never notice some
of their more specialised features.  For slightly more complex
hardware, like microwaves, or AC splits you will definitely can’t
properly use your tool without reading its manual and you will most
probably will break it, sooner or later.

And about software, advanced programs even with much less
functionality than Emacs come with manuals and a user usually needs to
read those to make a proper use of them.  I think more than half of
the programs that I have on my Linux system are useless without their
docs and manuals.  And the matter is even worse on Windows, most
professional applications can’t be even utilized without a proper
Education!  People take courses to understand how to use them.

All these examples of software and hardware don’t seem to be doomed or
going to be doomed.  Any tool needs prior knowledge at some degree.
When it’s more powerful, has and needs more documentation.
Like programming languages which are very powerful and not possible
to be used without reading stuff first.

> You miss people who want their editor to look cool. There are a lot of
> visiual attractions built right into doom and Spacemacs from the start.

True.  They are in “But still there are people using Doom/Spacemacs
not being from those two groups.”

--
Best Regards,
Abraham
Sent with Tutanota; https://tuta.com

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez]

Good point. A bit of organizing would help ;-)

Enviado desde mi iPhone

> El 6 oct 2024, a las 11:06, Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab@web.de> escribió:
> 
> Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <paaguti@gmail.com> writes:
>>> On distributions that may mean providing meta-packages which install
>>> required elpa-packages and are started from a script that prepares a
>>> $HOME/.emacs.d/ for the specific flavor of Emacs if it does not exist
>>> already.
>> Isn't that what some Emacs "impersonations" are doing. You clone a git repo as your $HOME/.emacs.d and there you are.
>> Look, for example at https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs#install
> 
> Yes, those are pre-configured settings.
> 
> Many already exist, but they are not organized, so most users don’t find
> them at the start of their journey, and they don’t necessarily
> coordinate to specialize for the task they do themselves.
> 
> Best wishes,
> Arne
> -- 
> Unpolitisch sein
> heißt politisch sein,
> ohne es zu merken.
> draketo.de
> <signature.asc>

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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"Abraham S.A.H." via "Emacs development discussions." <emacs-devel@gnu.org> writes:

>> No. Any software that says that you have to read the manual first is
>> doomed to fail for most people.
> Best is to make tools that can be used without reading manuals or
> education, as much as possible; while still keeping them
> well-documented and well-recorded.

I wholeheartedly agree.

> I think more than half of
> the programs that I have on my Linux system are useless without their
> docs and manuals.  

That’s different for me, but I enjoy the Guile info manual a lot;
especially read from Emacs. That’s often nicer that Googling for
solutions with Python.

> All these examples of software and hardware don’t seem to be doomed or
> going to be doomed.  Any tool needs prior knowledge at some degree.

For most tools you already have that prior knowledge from other
software; and often you can discover by trial and error (just clicking
buttons).

Which key is an awesome improvement for this discovery. Clicking ESC
even shows all M- bindings.

And I just learned about C-h b. That’s a command we should show more
prominently.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Abraham S.A.H." via "Emacs development discussions. wrote:

>> No. Any software that says that you have to read the manual
>> first is doomed to fail for most people.
>
> I think you missed the phrase "or alongside".  We already
> know that one can still use Emacs without reading its
> manual, though not Emacs' full potential.

You read the manuals for your TI-83 scientific calculator and
Makita impact driver as well?

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

> And I just learned about C-h b. That's a command we should
> show more prominently.

Here, read this interview, if you'd like - 

  https://sachachua.com/blog/2024/04/emacs-interview-daniel-semyonov/

this guy [hello if you are reading this] learned to program
just using the on-line help (that means Emacs' help, on-line
means not printed on paper).

And many people did that, this is the first time I heard it in
the Emacs world but using the help system and that's all.
The F1 keys on Windows if you remember. (Not sure if I do.
What did the F10 key do?)

So, one wonders, why is it better to read the manual ONCE
cover to cover in a book than bringing the help up whenever
one needs it, one short paragraph at a time, on the screen?
To me, if I had to pick only one, the computer version,
I would take that and not the book. (No, the help isn't _the_
manual, but it is _a_ manual, why not.)

People are different and we have different resources, it is
all good and we shouldn't assume anyone has done anything IMO.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > From that I could imagine a similar approach to provide different
  > installers that install a pre-configured Emacs for the specific task.

I am trying to figure out concretely what that means,
but I can't be sure -- there are many possibilities.

Who would select and install one "pre-configured Emacs"?
A user, for perself?  An admin, for a user?

Who would the chosen pre-configured Emacs be installed for?
For a site (affecting all users)?
For one particular user?

In any case, I don't think we would different versions _of Emacs_.
Wouldn't it suffice just to generate a .emacs file with a few
user options set?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Richard Stallman wrote:

>> From that I could imagine a similar approach to provide
>> different installers that install a pre-configured Emacs
>> for the specific task.
>
> I am trying to figure out concretely what that means, but
> I can't be sure -- there are many possibilities.
>
> Who would select and install one "pre-configured Emacs"?
> A user, for perself? An admin, for a user?

I think he means for example if the user wants to do mail or
IRC, say. Then we have an installer for Gnus (or rmail that
you wrote) and for ERC.

The installer probably facilitates setting the necessary
settings for those programs to work. And maybe set the theme
as well.

I must say the whole thing, if I am interpreting it correctly,
doesn't appeal to me that much but maybe it is actually a great
idea, hard to tell.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>   > From that I could imagine a similar approach to provide different
>   > installers that install a pre-configured Emacs for the specific task.
>
> Who would the chosen pre-configured Emacs be installed for?
> For a site (affecting all users)?
> For one particular user?

The pre-configuration should only affect the user who chooses it.

So it might be installed systemwide, but only actually setup the
$HOME/.emacs.d/init.el when it is started the first time.

> In any case, I don't think we would different versions _of Emacs_.
> Wouldn't it suffice just to generate a .emacs file with a few
> user options set?

Yes — the difference is not the implementation, but the workflow to get
that version. Reducing friction in that.

If users on GNU Linux can just `apt-get install emacs-for-cpp`, then
that emacs-for-cpp feels real. Even if the result is just a
pre-configured .emacs.d/init.el

If users on Windows can just get an installer of emacs-for-cpp, then
that emacs-for-cpp feels real. Even if ...

In both cases this could be an optimized configuration that enables
people to have an instantly running, well-optimized system for that
task.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Ship Mints]

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Probably already mentioned...Philip Kaludercic made the following Emacs
init file generator which might be a good basis for helping people get
started with specialized packages and configurations they might want to
try. It's written in common lisp but could be an elisp package as part of
Emacs, perhaps.

https://emacs.amodernist.com/

On Mon, Oct 7, 2024 at 7:15 AM Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org> wrote:

> Richard Stallman wrote:
>
> >> From that I could imagine a similar approach to provide
> >> different installers that install a pre-configured Emacs
> >> for the specific task.
> >
> > I am trying to figure out concretely what that means, but
> > I can't be sure -- there are many possibilities.
> >
> > Who would select and install one "pre-configured Emacs"?
> > A user, for perself? An admin, for a user?
>
> I think he means for example if the user wants to do mail or
> IRC, say. Then we have an installer for Gnus (or rmail that
> you wrote) and for ERC.
>
> The installer probably facilitates setting the necessary
> settings for those programs to work. And maybe set the theme
> as well.
>
> I must say the whole thing, if I am interpreting it correctly,
> doesn't appeal to me that much but maybe it is actually a great
> idea, hard to tell.
>
> --
> underground experts united
> https://dataswamp.org/~incal
>
>
>

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Ship Mints wrote:

> Probably already mentioned...Philip Kaludercic made the
> following Emacs init file generator which might be a good
> basis for helping people get started with specialized
> packages and configurations they might want to try.

That is probably what he set out to do, and he did it, and not
in a bad way, so good, the only objection would be this has to
be executed at the discretion of the user, yes, give me
guided configuration.

When I started to program I didn't know half of that stuff,
but I just might have had enough cognitive plusplus to grasp
the concept of a text editor and that Emacs was one.

So the first time anyone starts Emacs, blank .emacs or not,
what should happen is a very quick startup with as little
visual noise and technobabble as possible, and then just an
all-white, empty buffer: hello there, you came to the right
place, I am ALL YOURS to edit! Because, when the expected
happens, this is actually a good feeling even to
adventurous people.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[John ff]

⁣​

On 6 Oct 2024, 11:34, at 11:34, Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <paaguti@gmail.com> wrote:
>Good point. A bit of organizing would help ;-)
>
>Enviado desde mi iPhone
>
>> El 6 oct 2024, a las 11:06, Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide
><arne_bab@web.de> escribió:
>>
>> Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <paaguti@gmail.com> writes:
>>>> On distributions that may mean providing meta-packages which
>install
>>>> required elpa-packages and are started from a script that prepares
>a
>>>> $HOME/.emacs.d/ for the specific flavor of Emacs if it does not
>exist
>>>> already.
>>> Isn't that what some Emacs "impersonations" are doing. You clone a
>git repo as your $HOME/.emacs.d and there you are.
>>> Look, for example at https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs#install
>>
>> Yes, those are pre-configured settings.
>>
>> Many already exist, but they are not organized, so most users don’t
>find
>> them at the start of their journey, and they don’t necessarily
>> coordinate to specialize for the task they do themselves.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>> Arne
>> --
>> Unpolitisch sein
>> heißt politisch sein,
>> ohne es zu merken.
>> draketo.de
>> <signature.asc>

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > You read the manuals for your TI-83 scientific calculator and
  > Makita impact driver as well?

I have a feeling that question is sarcastic.

Sarcasm make the point unclear, so it leads to misunderstandings and
confusion.  I don't use either of those products, so I can't guess
what the point was.

Also, it tends to suggest hostility (even if none is actually meant).
That often hurts feelings and makes the discussion acrimonious.

Therefore we ask people to avoid sarcasm in our discussions.
See https://gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html.

Can you please restate your point without sarcasm, so it will be clear?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > > Isn't Emacs usable without any pre-configuration, out of the box?

  > It is a good editor without any pre-configuration (it even ships
  > org-mode). But to be a good Web-IDE, C++ or Scheme programming
  > environment, Server automation plattform, and so forth, it requires
  > configuration.

Between there to what follows

  > Which might be a reason why it is discovered by writers, and why
  > Spacemacs and Doom capture new people.

there is an yawning gulf.  My imagination can't get me from one to the
other.  Can you please explain how to cross?

You listed Web-IDE, C++ or Scheme programming environment, and Server
automation plattform as kinds of work a user might want Emacs set up
for.  Choosing Spacemacs first, does it do some of those three things?
Does Doom do some of those three things?

Aldo, when you say that each of them requires "configuration", could
you make that more concrete?  What sort of configuration does "Web
IDE" require?  What sort for Scheme programming environment?  And so
on.  I'm not asking for all the details, just an overall idea.

Could we easily add those missing kinds of configuration to Emacs?
If we did, would that make Emacs competitive with Spacemacs and Doom?

We generally try to make all sorts of packages for various uses of
Emacs coexist in a single Emacs job.  I get the impression people are
assuming that these different configurations are mutually incompatible,
so that it is necessary to choose which one to install.

Is that what people assume?  If people do, why so?  Why can't
users select one at run time?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > The idea of adding a button for beginners at the startup page and
  > making it go to an Org page

Could you explain the connection between "a button for beginners"
and "go to an Org page"?  Is this an assumption that beginners
all want the same thing?

Aside from being in Org mode, what would that page contain?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>   > It is a good editor without any pre-configuration (it even ships
>   > org-mode). But to be a good Web-IDE, C++ or Scheme programming
>   > environment, Server automation plattform, and so forth, it requires
>   > configuration.
>
> Between there to what follows
>
>   > Which might be a reason why it is discovered by writers, and why
>   > Spacemacs and Doom capture new people.
>
> there is an yawning gulf.  My imagination can't get me from one to the
> other.  Can you please explain how to cross?
>
> You listed Web-IDE, C++ or Scheme programming environment, and Server
> automation plattform as kinds of work a user might want Emacs set up
> for.  Choosing Spacemacs first, does it do some of those three things?
> Does Doom do some of those three things?

Yes: both Spacemacs and Doom provide ready-made configurations that can
be activated to get an environment optimized for that task.

> Aldo, when you say that each of them requires "configuration", could
> you make that more concrete?  What sort of configuration does "Web
> IDE" require?  What sort for Scheme programming environment?  And so
> on.  I'm not asking for all the details, just an overall idea.

Activating the correct set of modes, installing some packages, tweaking
some customizations.

> Could we easily add those missing kinds of configuration to Emacs?
> If we did, would that make Emacs competitive with Spacemacs and Doom?

That’s the point, yes: improving the newcomer experience of regular
Emacs. But note that Spacemacs and Doom are simply configurations of
Emacs, though pretty far from Vanilla Emacs.

> so that it is necessary to choose which one to install.
>
> Is that what people assume?  If people do, why so?  Why can't
> users select one at run time?

I do not assume that. It’s rather that a C++ IDE and a writing system
and Scheme Programming and a Web-IDE have a lot of overlap, so some of
the modes they use are the same, sometimes with a bit different setup.

For long-time users that’s great: all the different things interact
nicely. That’s something not found elsewhere.

But for new users it means that they can’t just activate the C++-mode,
but instead they have to track down the right configuration options.

There are already some optimized setups for C++ (and for others, too),
but which one of these are good for the specific task is hard to figure
out and they are not really discoverable from Emacs. And that’s also a
step that most users today won’t do. They see that Emacs doesn’t solve
their current problem out of the box and switch to a program that does.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eduardo Ochs]

On Wed, 9 Oct 2024 at 00:30, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>   > The idea of adding a button for beginners at the startup page and
>   > making it go to an Org page
>
> Could you explain the connection between "a button for beginners"
> and "go to an Org page"?  Is this an assumption that beginners
> all want the same thing?
>
> Aside from being in Org mode, what would that page contain?


Hi Richard,

I don't know Org well, and when I wrote that I had the impression that
we could create an Org page with:

  1. checkboxes that looked like these,

       [ ] rainbow delimiters: (explanation)
       [ ] blink cursor: (explanation)

     and that would be associated to the variables `bopt-rainbow' and
     `bopt-blink', where "bopt-" is a prefix that means "beginner
     options",

  2. a code block that would read the variables `bopt-rainbow' and
     `bopt-blink', and do something that would depend on them... for
     example, in a prototype that code block would just display a
     string like "rainbow:yes blink:no".

...but now I have the impression that to do something like that in a
simple way we would need something that has a part in Org and a part
that uses customize - but I don't know how to do that either. I was
expecting that some people would suggest techniques for writing that
prototype, but that did not happen (yet).

Nowadays lots of people suggest that beginners should start learning
Emacs by interacting with pages in Org mode, because Org mode is
similar enough to things that the beginners-from-nowadays already
know. That is not my experience, but that may be because I live in
Brazil, and the beginners that we have here know VERY little - and
also I've been using GNU/Linux since the mid-90s, and I don't know
the things that "all the beginners-from-nowadays know".

Also, when I teach Emacs to beginners I always start by teaching them
how to execute sexps like

  (+ 1 2)

and

  (info "(emacs)User Input")

with C-e C-x C-e - and in the second case they also need to learn how
to go back. I've been having a lot of success with that approach -
but, again, that may be because the beginners here are different from
the beginners from most other places.

Anyway, I was expecting that people would send prototypes...

  Cheers,
    Eduardo Ochs

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Johan Myréen]

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I see this more as a documentation problem. Emacs lacks "official"
documentation on how to configure an environment to do certain things,
which includes installing certain Elisp packages, and configuring them. I'm
going to use software development as an example.

In the good old days software development meant editing a few C files in
Emacs and then running make. This no longer meets the expectations people
have of a software development environment. For example, creating a
contemporary environment to write and build software using the Rust
programming language and Emacs, you need Rust mode, rust-ts-mode for
Treesitter integration, Eglot to communicate with rust-analyzer (a Language
Server implementation for Rust) for completion and goto definition, Company
mode for code completion, Magit for version control, DAP mode for
debugging, and so on. Many of these packages have alternative
implementations, for example rustic-mode instead of rust-mode.

I'm not saying you can't edit Rust code without all these packages, but
these packages combined provide the minimum that the competition (e.g.
Visual Studio Code) offers.

The packages are all available for Emacs, which is fine. The problem is
that there is no single source for how to put together the Rust environment
for Emacs using the packages. I would prefer official Gnu Emacs
documentation telling me what packages are needed (including a description
of pros and cons of competing modes), how to install them, and what
configuration is needed.

In the absence of official documentation, you will have to search the net
for tutorials on the subject. These third party tutorials are often of
quite low quality. Many of them are out of date, and, what's worse, often
contain irrelevant and extremely opinionated information, like disabling
the Emacs menu and toolbars, enabling evil mode, etc. A beginner can have
trouble filtering out what's essential and what's not. As another example,
at some point the web page describing how to use Emacs for Clojure
programming said to start with completely removing the .emacs file and the
.emacs.d directory. No explanation was given what these files are, what
they might be needed for, or what the consequences of this removal would
be. Not even a suggestion to make a backup of the files was given.


On Wed, 9 Oct 2024 at 06:30, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > > Isn't Emacs usable without any pre-configuration, out of the box?
>
>   > It is a good editor without any pre-configuration (it even ships
>   > org-mode). But to be a good Web-IDE, C++ or Scheme programming
>   > environment, Server automation plattform, and so forth, it requires
>   > configuration.
>
> Between there to what follows
>
>   > Which might be a reason why it is discovered by writers, and why
>   > Spacemacs and Doom capture new people.
>
> there is an yawning gulf.  My imagination can't get me from one to the
> other.  Can you please explain how to cross?
>
> You listed Web-IDE, C++ or Scheme programming environment, and Server
> automation plattform as kinds of work a user might want Emacs set up
> for.  Choosing Spacemacs first, does it do some of those three things?
> Does Doom do some of those three things?
>
> Aldo, when you say that each of them requires "configuration", could
> you make that more concrete?  What sort of configuration does "Web
> IDE" require?  What sort for Scheme programming environment?  And so
> on.  I'm not asking for all the details, just an overall idea.
>
> Could we easily add those missing kinds of configuration to Emacs?
> If we did, would that make Emacs competitive with Spacemacs and Doom?
>
> We generally try to make all sorts of packages for various uses of
> Emacs coexist in a single Emacs job.  I get the impression people are
> assuming that these different configurations are mutually incompatible,
> so that it is necessary to choose which one to install.
>
> Is that what people assume?  If people do, why so?  Why can't
> users select one at run time?
>
> --
> Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
>
>
>
>

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Johan Myréen <johan.myreen@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2024 14:09:13 +0300
> 
> I see this more as a documentation problem. Emacs lacks "official" documentation on how to configure an
> environment to do certain things, which includes installing certain Elisp packages, and configuring them.

My analysis is different.  Emacs lacks volunteers who'd sit down and
write documentation on how to configure Emacs for this or that job.
Once that is written, and written well, admitting it into Emacs is
usually a no-brainer.

Mind you: the above is an extremely non-trivial job, because the sheer
number of possible "jobs" which Emacs can support is mind-boggling.
Even if someone describes in excruciating detail how to configure
Emacs for Rust development, that only helps people who need to develop
programs in Rust, but doesn't help at all to, say, someone who needs to
write a thesis about some academic subject, or read email from Gmail
or even develop C++ programs, or...

> In the good old days software development meant editing a few C files in Emacs and then running make.
> This no longer meets the expectations people have of a software development environment. For example,
> creating a contemporary environment to write and build software using the Rust programming language and
> Emacs, you need Rust mode, rust-ts-mode for Treesitter integration, Eglot to communicate with
> rust-analyzer (a Language Server implementation for Rust) for completion and goto definition, Company
> mode for code completion, Magit for version control, DAP mode for debugging, and so on. Many of these
> packages have alternative implementations, for example rustic-mode instead of rust-mode.

This is an exaggeration to some degree.  rust-ts-mode is part of
Emacs, and could be turned on automatically when a Rust file is
visited; we didn't do that because we are unsure whether users of an
unbundled Rust mode will protest.  Eglot is part of Emacs, but it
cannot be started automatically because the LSP server, which is a
separate piece of software, needs to be installed and configured
first; are we supposed to be held responsible for that as well?  We do
have TAGS support for Rust (goto definition etc., so alternative to
LSP), and the new etags-regen-mode might just make the job of using
TAGS much easier and seamless.  Magit is nice, but not really
necessary, since we have VC built in, which doesn't need to be
configured.  DAP is not necessary, since Emacs has a GDB front-end
(which doesn't need to be configured, just invoked with a single
command), and GDB supports debugging Rust programs.

So things are not that bad, are they?

I do agree that good tutorials which would mention all this stuff
would make things better, at least for those who read documentation
(how many do?), but that needs volunteers to sit down and write that
up.  Would you please consider doing something like that for some jobs
with which you are familiar?

> I'm not saying you can't edit Rust code without all these packages, but these packages combined provide
> the minimum that the competition (e.g. Visual Studio Code) offers.

I'm guessing VSCode comes with pre-configured LSP servers, a single
Rust mode, and a single Git interface.  Am I mistaken?  If so, is that
how we want to treat our users? will they agree to be treated like
that?

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[tomas]

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On Wed, Oct 09, 2024 at 04:13:58PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

[...]

> I'm guessing VSCode comes with pre-configured LSP servers, a single
> Rust mode, and a single Git interface.  Am I mistaken?  If so, is that
> how we want to treat our users? will they agree to be treated like
> that?

This is what vscode installs on some remote devel container:

  # du -sh ~/.vscode-server
  1.8G    /home/user/.vscode-server

Needless to say, you will meet people around here who would characterise
this as "bloat" and would prefer tramp.

So you'll have to multiply the "number of task types" by the number of
devel styles to get at a more realistic assessment of the matrix :-)

I for one will avoid LSPs wherever I possibly can.

Cheers
-- 
t

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Johan Myréen <johan.myreen@gmail.com>
>> Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2024 14:09:13 +0300
>> 
>> I see this more as a documentation problem. Emacs lacks "official" documentation on how to configure an
>> environment to do certain things, which includes installing certain Elisp packages, and configuring them.
>
> My analysis is different.  Emacs lacks volunteers who'd sit down and
> write documentation on how to configure Emacs for this or that job.

I think the problem is different: there are already people who write
documentation on how to configure Emacs for tasks. There are also many
.emacs.d reppositories.

There are awesome Emacs setups out there, much better than what I have.

What’s missing is a way to integrate these efforts into Emacs so new
users can benefit from them.

I don’t know the best way to do that integration, but I think
integrating these in some way for new users could help a lot.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Johan Myréen]

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I understand Emacs is a volunteer project and finding good documentation
writers is difficult. I was just suggesting what direction I would like to
see Emacs documentation going. Emacs has a good and extensive manual that
provides mostly a great reference to how to use Emacs as an editor. What I
am proposing is a higher level view, a kind of cookbook on how to do
different things with Emacs.

I just started my Emacs (from the main branch) with -q and opened a Rust
source file. Emacs out of the box does not even recognize the .rs file
extension: the file is opened in Fundamental mode. A novice Emacs user
might guess that he or she needs to install a Rust mode for Emacs to
recognize we are editing Rust source code. But by only doing this the user
is missing out on so much useful functionality Emacs has to offer. How is
the user supposed to know that ¨Eglot" is the way to connect to a language
server, or that a package named ¨Company" provides completion? The only way
right now is to search for this on the internet, which is associated with
the quality problems I described in my previous message.

Software has grown more complex during the years Emacs has been in
existence, and so have the expectations of the public using it. Emacs has
fantastic collections of packages, each focusing on different things. This
is a good modular design. Some of these packages can be used to form, for
example, a working Rust development environment. The problem is finding
these packages. How does a new Emacs user know what to look for?

So I am proposing a "task-oriented" category in the Emacs documentation. I
don´t think there is such a category.

Eglot is part of Emacs, but it cannot be started automatically because the
> LSP server, which is a
> separate piece of software, needs to be installed and configured first;
> are we supposed to be held
> responsible for that as well


No, all I am talking about is documentation. In fact I really dislike some
things that happen by magic, but are undocumented. They typically break
over time, which is a bigger headache to fix than configuring things by
hand using good documentation.

I'm guessing VSCode comes with pre-configured LSP servers, a single
> Rust mode, and a single Git interface.  Am I mistaken?
>

No, VSCode does not come pre-configured for Rust development. But, there is
a good, task-oriented web page that describes in simple terms what needs to
be installed and configured to start writing Rust code using VSCode.
Similar pages exist for Java, Javascript, C++, C#, Python, Go, etc. More
importantly, this documentation can be found on code.visualstudio.com (
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/rust), not on YouTube.com or
robert.kra.hn or some other random website.

Johan Myréen




On Wed, 9 Oct 2024 at 16:14, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > From: Johan Myréen <johan.myreen@gmail.com>
> > Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2024 14:09:13 +0300
> >
> > I see this more as a documentation problem. Emacs lacks "official"
> documentation on how to configure an
> > environment to do certain things, which includes installing certain
> Elisp packages, and configuring them.
>
> My analysis is different.  Emacs lacks volunteers who'd sit down and
> write documentation on how to configure Emacs for this or that job.
> Once that is written, and written well, admitting it into Emacs is
> usually a no-brainer.
>
> Mind you: the above is an extremely non-trivial job, because the sheer
> number of possible "jobs" which Emacs can support is mind-boggling.
> Even if someone describes in excruciating detail how to configure
> Emacs for Rust development, that only helps people who need to develop
> programs in Rust, but doesn't help at all to, say, someone who needs to
> write a thesis about some academic subject, or read email from Gmail
> or even develop C++ programs, or...
>
> > In the good old days software development meant editing a few C files in
> Emacs and then running make.
> > This no longer meets the expectations people have of a software
> development environment. For example,
> > creating a contemporary environment to write and build software using
> the Rust programming language and
> > Emacs, you need Rust mode, rust-ts-mode for Treesitter integration,
> Eglot to communicate with
> > rust-analyzer (a Language Server implementation for Rust) for completion
> and goto definition, Company
> > mode for code completion, Magit for version control, DAP mode for
> debugging, and so on. Many of these
> > packages have alternative implementations, for example rustic-mode
> instead of rust-mode.
>
> This is an exaggeration to some degree.  rust-ts-mode is part of
> Emacs, and could be turned on automatically when a Rust file is
> visited; we didn't do that because we are unsure whether users of an
> unbundled Rust mode will protest.  Eglot is part of Emacs, but it
> cannot be started automatically because the LSP server, which is a
> separate piece of software, needs to be installed and configured
> first; are we supposed to be held responsible for that as well?  We do
> have TAGS support for Rust (goto definition etc., so alternative to
> LSP), and the new etags-regen-mode might just make the job of using
> TAGS much easier and seamless.  Magit is nice, but not really
> necessary, since we have VC built in, which doesn't need to be
> configured.  DAP is not necessary, since Emacs has a GDB front-end
> (which doesn't need to be configured, just invoked with a single
> command), and GDB supports debugging Rust programs.
>
> So things are not that bad, are they?
>
> I do agree that good tutorials which would mention all this stuff
> would make things better, at least for those who read documentation
> (how many do?), but that needs volunteers to sit down and write that
> up.  Would you please consider doing something like that for some jobs
> with which you are familiar?
>
> > I'm not saying you can't edit Rust code without all these packages, but
> these packages combined provide
> > the minimum that the competition (e.g. Visual Studio Code) offers.
>
> I'm guessing VSCode comes with pre-configured LSP servers, a single
> Rust mode, and a single Git interface.  Am I mistaken?  If so, is that
> how we want to treat our users? will they agree to be treated like
> that?
>

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Ship Mints]

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Speaking of cookbooks, some people prefer packaged food, some prefer
cooking. I see Emacs as a platform for those who prefer cooking. Public
support via reddit or stackoverflow or the Emacs mailing lists, tends to be
friendly and helpful but can't substitute users' own desires to cook for
themselves. When VSCode goes wrong, they have to figure stuff out for
themselves anyway (it's a fairly buggy ecosystem, in my experience). If
they can handle the complexity of the Rust compiler, they can handle the
complexity of Emacs. They just have to cook a little.

On Wed, Oct 9, 2024 at 12:07 PM Johan Myréen <johan.myreen@gmail.com> wrote:

> I understand Emacs is a volunteer project and finding good documentation
> writers is difficult. I was just suggesting what direction I would like to
> see Emacs documentation going. Emacs has a good and extensive manual that
> provides mostly a great reference to how to use Emacs as an editor. What I
> am proposing is a higher level view, a kind of cookbook on how to do
> different things with Emacs.
>
> I just started my Emacs (from the main branch) with -q and opened a Rust
> source file. Emacs out of the box does not even recognize the .rs file
> extension: the file is opened in Fundamental mode. A novice Emacs user
> might guess that he or she needs to install a Rust mode for Emacs to
> recognize we are editing Rust source code. But by only doing this the user
> is missing out on so much useful functionality Emacs has to offer. How is
> the user supposed to know that ¨Eglot" is the way to connect to a language
> server, or that a package named ¨Company" provides completion? The only way
> right now is to search for this on the internet, which is associated with
> the quality problems I described in my previous message.
>
> Software has grown more complex during the years Emacs has been in
> existence, and so have the expectations of the public using it. Emacs has
> fantastic collections of packages, each focusing on different things. This
> is a good modular design. Some of these packages can be used to form, for
> example, a working Rust development environment. The problem is finding
> these packages. How does a new Emacs user know what to look for?
>
> So I am proposing a "task-oriented" category in the Emacs documentation. I
> don´t think there is such a category.
>
> Eglot is part of Emacs, but it cannot be started automatically because the
>> LSP server, which is a
>> separate piece of software, needs to be installed and configured first;
>> are we supposed to be held
>> responsible for that as well
>
>
> No, all I am talking about is documentation. In fact I really dislike some
> things that happen by magic, but are undocumented. They typically break
> over time, which is a bigger headache to fix than configuring things by
> hand using good documentation.
>
> I'm guessing VSCode comes with pre-configured LSP servers, a single
>> Rust mode, and a single Git interface.  Am I mistaken?
>>
>
> No, VSCode does not come pre-configured for Rust development. But, there
> is a good, task-oriented web page that describes in simple terms what needs
> to be installed and configured to start writing Rust code using VSCode.
> Similar pages exist for Java, Javascript, C++, C#, Python, Go, etc. More
> importantly, this documentation can be found on code.visualstudio.com (
> https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/rust), not on YouTube.com or
> robert.kra.hn or some other random website.
>
> Johan Myréen
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, 9 Oct 2024 at 16:14, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>> > From: Johan Myréen <johan.myreen@gmail.com>
>> > Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2024 14:09:13 +0300
>> >
>> > I see this more as a documentation problem. Emacs lacks "official"
>> documentation on how to configure an
>> > environment to do certain things, which includes installing certain
>> Elisp packages, and configuring them.
>>
>> My analysis is different.  Emacs lacks volunteers who'd sit down and
>> write documentation on how to configure Emacs for this or that job.
>> Once that is written, and written well, admitting it into Emacs is
>> usually a no-brainer.
>>
>> Mind you: the above is an extremely non-trivial job, because the sheer
>> number of possible "jobs" which Emacs can support is mind-boggling.
>> Even if someone describes in excruciating detail how to configure
>> Emacs for Rust development, that only helps people who need to develop
>> programs in Rust, but doesn't help at all to, say, someone who needs to
>> write a thesis about some academic subject, or read email from Gmail
>> or even develop C++ programs, or...
>>
>> > In the good old days software development meant editing a few C files
>> in Emacs and then running make.
>> > This no longer meets the expectations people have of a software
>> development environment. For example,
>> > creating a contemporary environment to write and build software using
>> the Rust programming language and
>> > Emacs, you need Rust mode, rust-ts-mode for Treesitter integration,
>> Eglot to communicate with
>> > rust-analyzer (a Language Server implementation for Rust) for
>> completion and goto definition, Company
>> > mode for code completion, Magit for version control, DAP mode for
>> debugging, and so on. Many of these
>> > packages have alternative implementations, for example rustic-mode
>> instead of rust-mode.
>>
>> This is an exaggeration to some degree.  rust-ts-mode is part of
>> Emacs, and could be turned on automatically when a Rust file is
>> visited; we didn't do that because we are unsure whether users of an
>> unbundled Rust mode will protest.  Eglot is part of Emacs, but it
>> cannot be started automatically because the LSP server, which is a
>> separate piece of software, needs to be installed and configured
>> first; are we supposed to be held responsible for that as well?  We do
>> have TAGS support for Rust (goto definition etc., so alternative to
>> LSP), and the new etags-regen-mode might just make the job of using
>> TAGS much easier and seamless.  Magit is nice, but not really
>> necessary, since we have VC built in, which doesn't need to be
>> configured.  DAP is not necessary, since Emacs has a GDB front-end
>> (which doesn't need to be configured, just invoked with a single
>> command), and GDB supports debugging Rust programs.
>>
>> So things are not that bad, are they?
>>
>> I do agree that good tutorials which would mention all this stuff
>> would make things better, at least for those who read documentation
>> (how many do?), but that needs volunteers to sit down and write that
>> up.  Would you please consider doing something like that for some jobs
>> with which you are familiar?
>>
>> > I'm not saying you can't edit Rust code without all these packages, but
>> these packages combined provide
>> > the minimum that the competition (e.g. Visual Studio Code) offers.
>>
>> I'm guessing VSCode comes with pre-configured LSP servers, a single
>> Rust mode, and a single Git interface.  Am I mistaken?  If so, is that
>> how we want to treat our users? will they agree to be treated like
>> that?
>>
>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 8554 bytes --]

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de>
> Cc: Johan Myréen <johan.myreen@gmail.com>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2024 18:02:14 +0200
> 
> > My analysis is different.  Emacs lacks volunteers who'd sit down and
> > write documentation on how to configure Emacs for this or that job.
> 
> I think the problem is different: there are already people who write
> documentation on how to configure Emacs for tasks. There are also many
> .emacs.d reppositories.
> 
> There are awesome Emacs setups out there, much better than what I have.

Those people need to come here and work with us on integrating their
work into the Emacs documentation set.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Johan Myréen <johan.myreen@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2024 19:06:12 +0300
> 
> I just started my Emacs (from the main branch) with -q and opened a Rust source file. Emacs out of the box
> does not even recognize the .rs file extension: the file is opened in Fundamental mode.

I explained why we did it like that.  To have the .rs extension
recognized, you need to load rust-ts-mode first.

Emacs tries very hard not to break any user's configuration, and
sometimes that means newcomers have to work harder.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Richard Stallman wrote:

>> You read the manuals for your TI-83 scientific calculator
>> and Makita impact driver as well?
>
> I have a feeling that question is sarcastic.

Oh, I'm never sarcastic. People never understand what I mean,
here and in life in geneal, just imagine how it would be if
I went around being sarcastic. Now you made me think ...

What I meant was: Does he read ALL tech manuals?

Or just SOME? If he reads some, is it because some stuff is
more complicated or is it because some stuff - that he cares
more for it and is more active with and around it?

> Sarcasm make the point unclear, so it leads to
> misunderstandings and confusion. I don't use either of those
> products, so I can't guess what the point was.
>
> Also, it tends to suggest hostility (even if none is
> actually meant). That often hurts feelings and makes the
> discussion acrimonious.
>
> Therefore we ask people to avoid sarcasm in our discussions.
> See https://gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html.

Yes, I know, and I agree. You could add a paragraph what you
should do when you feel hurt. Not when you feel a lot hurt,
then instinct takes over anyway, but when you go from happy to
sad because of something someone said, be it the thing itself
or how it was formulated and put forward.

The only thing I've come up with is immediately as yourself,
"did this person intend to be a jerk to you?" I have found
that whatever answer you reach, it tends to have removed some
of the hurtness already.

You can also visualize yourself from the outside. You see
a guy with a keyboard, not feeling good, hurting, even, and
you see it is you, but still you have removed yourself from
pain and you can stay out as long as needed, and when you
return, you know about the pain, because it happened, and you
remember it, but you don't FEEL it in the same way.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

> That's the point, yes: improving the newcomer experience

Good word! Much better than "beginner".

If we have newcomers, where are they, and how are we
communicating with them?

Becuse then I think we should just ask, what problems do
you experience? It is quite possible they have completely
unrelated issues to the ones we think they have.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 09/10/2024 16:13, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> rust-ts-mode is part of
> Emacs, and could be turned on automatically when a Rust file is
> visited; we didn't do that because we are unsure whether users of an
> unbundled Rust mode will protest

That seems unlikely: as long as the auto-mode-alist configuration for 
rust-ts-mode is done early on in Emacs's startup, any installed 3rd 
party package such as rust-mode would add its config later, and thus 
have priority.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Hello, I was asked to send this to this list; it is from our
anonymous IRC fried.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Hi,

Thank you all for your interest in my message, and for taking
time to read it and time to reply. I will try to reply to all
your messages in this single message.

I first thought the implementation I proposed was obvious, so
I kept some space for your suggestions as you know emacs
better than me, but it seems that this brought a lot of
confusions, so this new message will bring all the details
about the implementation so you do not have to guess what
I meant.

I prefer that you keep in mind the main goal (and not the
implementation itself), which is: To make emacs up and running
with a useful configuration (not only as text editor, even
here many customizations can enhance emacs) in a reasonable
time, for almost every situation/scenario for everybody.

What I meant by "everybody" is any potential user, that emacs
can offer him to do what he needs to do (if emacs can do
something, and a user needs to do this thing, then he is
a potential emacs user). He can be dev/non-dev or
beginner/non-beginner, no difference between users.

Users who wants to read the manual first to use emacs, are
already taken care of, and the manual is great. But what about
all the other users ?

I stated in my previous message, that I immediately discarded
to propose the idea of a pre-configured init file
(pre-configured emacs), and this was for many reasons:

1. There are a lot of "elementary" use cases/customizations,
   which new users usually want to start with (only one task
   they need at the very moment). But what if they, just after
   that, want to mix between these to make more "complex" use
   cases/customizations? or even to change a single
   customization which does not suites them in a given
   pre-configuration? This quickly becomes unmanageable.

2. This also has a big problem which is to make everyone agree
   on what are those use cases to provide
   a pre-configuration for.

3. Another big problem is to make everyone agree on what are
   the "defaults" to put in each pre-configuration.

I think, in general, any idea which is very opinionated, will
start a long debate before it eventually fails (wasting lot of
efforts).

4. This will also need extra work to publish and maintain all
   these pre-configurations with their documentations.

Some suggested that this is a documentation problem, and emacs
needs to provide official documentations to customize emacs
for certain tasks. Even though this is a very useful
enhancement to emacs, it is very similar to the idea of
a pre-configured emacs, thus having the same drawbacks listed
above, in addition to leaving the user to do the
pre-configuration himself which brings all discussion to the
beginning (and also adding more documentations for the user to
read).

That is why I suggested the Q&A customization:

1. User can freely customize emacs for any use case (simple or
   complex/combination or even small tweaks).

2. User will customize emacs from the ground up (self cooking,
   with no magic). Hiding details he does not really need to
   know to start using emacs (he will, but this will happens
   later).

3. User will also be able to re-customize emacs (in the same
   way he did at the beginning).

4. emacs defaults are unchanged (avoiding any agreements
   problems).

5. no use cases (pre-configurations) to agree on.

6. no new defaults to be introduced or to agree on.

7. no extra effort to document, publish and maintain any
   pre-configuration (I think this implementation will help
   and encourage users to generate their own
   pre-configurations, for some specific tasks, in a very easy
   way, and start sharing them).

I wrote the implementation in HTML, which you can find at the
end of this message (all the links inside are empty and does
not link to any resources).

Please do not consider the design, fonts, colors and text
content, etc. I am not a designer and I may also have wrote
something wrong about emacs, so feel free to change or
correct anything.

If this implementation does not suites you, you can also
change it, this implementation is provided to have better view
of the main idea.

If this implementation suites you, I think it will need 3
things to be completed:

1. Fill the dots (...) and change/adapt the
   text,colors,links,... that I suggested.

2. List all the questions/customizations to be asked for user,
   and organize them in a hierarchy.

3. Write the code that will collect user input, and configure
   emacs accordingly.

It is not necessary to add all the possible
questions/customizations before making this feature available
in emacs. A useful subset is just fine, and more
questions/customizations can be added gradually later.

The implementation is mainly about 2 parts:

1. part1: "Getting started" (or introduction to emacs).

2. part2: "What is next" (or emacs customization).

For part1’s implementation, I had to modify the actual *GNU
Emacs* startup buffer, so I:

- moved some links to a new *Get Started* buffer (I have
  added).

- kept only what I guess should really be kept.

- modified/added some texts.

- added a "Get Started" link which should open the new *Get
  Started* buffer. (feel free to change the names or anything,
  as stated previously, the names I chose everywhere are only
  for demonstration).

Part1 can be added to emacs as of now, if everybody agree on
of course (with some work to fully complete it), because it is
totally independent from part2, and it enhances user first
experience with emacs. If you want, you can move part1 (part1
HTML) to a separate thread to collect everybody input on
it separately.

I added part2 also inside the same new *Get Started* buffer,
it can be easily moved to a separate *What Is Next* buffer if
needed (in this case a "What is Next" link should be added in
*Get Started* buffer to open the *What Is Next* buffer).

1. part1: Getting Started:

This part is to introduce user to emacs vocabulary/environment
in a very quick way, because emacs vocabulary is very special,
and the ui also like for example the modeline (which is useful
to start using emacs). Only things that user need to know to
start using emacs are to be shown, when the user is satisfied
he will be motivated to read further, and even read the
manual later.

Anything which is not really necessary to start using emacs
like keybindings, packages,..., better be avoided.

Even the minibuffer, that is why I only mentioned the "echo
area", new users does not need to know the difference between
the "echo area" and the minibuffer (if I am not wrong), and
previous emacs users will understand this as well (because the
minibuffer is displayed in the "echo area" anyway). New users
should also not know that they can open multiple frames, to
start using emacs, etc.

The introduction should not only be as short as possible, but
as easy, attractive, entertaining as possible, in other word
non-boring or difficult to understand.

For example when user start clicking on the links and see the
immediate result of his actions, he will continue clicking and
clicking, etc.

From the first time user open emacs, he will be guided, and
start clicking and clicking, and in about 20 to 25
entertaining clicks and 5 to 10min reading, he will be
familiar with emacs, and feels he can do something useful,
without even noticing the time he spent there.

This part is not fully completed (almost completed), but is
enough to give you a very clear idea. This part is also needed
for the part2 ("customizations" part), as the user cannot be
asked if he wants to remember the windows positions, without
him knowing what a window is in the first place. etc (even if
user is familiar with similar softwares, emacs has a special
vocabulary, as stated above, that user needs to know before
using/customizing emacs).

2. part2: What is next (the "customization" part):

This part can be moved to a separate dedicated *What Is Next*
buffer, if it is better, as stated above.

This part is also already described in my previous message (If
you landed here directly, I encourage you to read the first
message
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2024-10/msg00018.html).

This part give a user a fast way to customize emacs to his
needs, by asking him questions.

This is somehow similar to the idea of the actual "Customize
Startup" link located in the actual *GNU Emacs* startup
buffer, but this actual link contains only a very limited
subset and are also not beginner friendly (lot of advanced
vocabulary that needs user to read the manual first).

This is also similar to https://emacs.amodernist.com/
I mentioned in my previous message.

I also prefer this "customization" part to be questions asked
in the minibuffer if possible, and not a a sequence of buffers
with long texts, checkboxes, buttons, fields,..., like the
"customization interface".

This is just a personal preference, if you think this is not
possible or not user friendly or any other reason, it is ok.
If this will cause agreement issues, then maybe both can be
added, and let the user choose which one he wants to use (if
the ui interface is chosen/implemented, it will be very easy
to implement the Q&A in the minibuffer anyway).

It is basically a hierarchy of questions with the top level
questions being let say around 10, so when the user click the
"Start customizing Emacs" link (I added), he needs to press
the "Enter" key 10 times to know what he can do with emacs
(ui/themes, basic editing, communication suite, development,
org, ...), and only when the user chose to customize
something, he will be asked the corresponding next level
questions, also the next level questions should be as few as
possible, and the next level questions too, etc...

Similar to the "customization interface" hierarchy but using
more generic and beginner friendly terms, and proposing
features which can be found in GNU ELPA archive packages
(without the user having to know about packages, and use the
actual "package interface" to discover new packages and
install them manually, etc.)

When the user is satisfied, he will be motivated to read the
manual later and know more about emacs.

Imagine a developer who needs a code editor with a LSP client,
and he does not know anything at all about emacs and also
about some other editor. Compare the time he needs to use
emacs as a LSP client with auto-complete, and the time he
needs to use the other editor as LSP client with
auto-complete. He needs to spend at least days, if not weeks
to understand many things about emacs and have something
useful to work with.

This is just one and a very simple example among many.

This is not to mention all the compile errors when installing
a package sometimes, ..., and if he wants to customize emacs
by editing the init file directly, how many times emacs will
start with a blank page with an error, because he forgets
a single parentheses somewhere, and he finds himself totally
blocked, ... , this is not to mention too the packages that
are really useful to first use emacs specially for beginners,
like undo-tree, vertico+orderless if they want to read about
and use the minibuffer directly, ...).

All these times spent by previous emacs users, and that will
be spent by new emacs users, can be easily avoided, and maybe
converted into contributing to emacs. The thing is that you
need to encourage users to start using emacs in the first
place, by lowering the entry barrier, and many of them will
sooner or later go and read the manual, and know more about
emacs, and contribute to add some functionalities they need
and/or correct a bug they are facing, but if users are
discarded from the beginning, this is not good.

Some users may instead be interested in (or prefer) reading
the manual first, and using the customization interface or
manually editing the init file, why not, but even here, many
do not have enough time to do that, so they let it go.

That is why I think this feature is very useful. I may be
wrong, or I may have missed something.

I am not saying that users should not use the "customization
interface" or edit the init file directly. I only think that
the entry barrier to emacs is too high (to discourage most
users), and can be easily lowered.

This will not only be for beginners, even people who are
already using emacs can use it. There will be 3 ways to
configure emacs:

- customization interface.

- editing the init file directly.

- this new feature.

This feature can contains advanced customizations of course
(for example that needs user to read emacs manual or any other
documentation before using them), but they will be hidden
behind questions like "Do you want to customize IRC client
(yes/no) ?":

- users who does not know anything about IRC and not
  interested will choose "no".

- interested users will go to read about IRC to know more
  about it and come back later. They can even choose "yes" to
  see what are the next questions (without affecting emacs).

- and users who already know about IRC, will choose "yes", and
  will know how to answer the next questions and how to use
  IRC afterwards.

Thank you all for you time,

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
.ui {
  background-color: lightskyblue;
  color: #fff;
  display: inline-block;
  padding: 0px 3px;
  border-radius: 3px;
}

.action {
  background-color: lightgrey;
  color: #fff;
  display: inline-block;
  padding: 0px 3px;
  border-radius: 3px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>

<span>[*GNU Emacs* buffer START]</span>
<div id="GNU Emacs">
<hr></hr>
<h1 style="text-align:center;">[EMACS LOGO]</h1>
<h2 style="text-align:center;">Welcome to GNU Emacs</a></h2>

<p style="color: #ff0000;">Welcome to <a href="">GNU Emacs</a>, one component of the <a href="">GNU/Linux</a> operating system.</p>

<h3>Before getting started, you may want to check:</h3>
<ol style="list-style: none; font-size: 14px; line-height: 32px; font-weight: bold;">
<li> <a href="">Absence of Warranty </a> GNU Emacs comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY</li>
<li> <a href="">Copying Conditions</a> Conditions for redistributing and changing Emacs</li>
</ol>

<h2 style="text-align:center;"><a href="">Get Started</a></h2>
<p>This is GNU Emacs version ... build ...<br/>
Copyright (C) ... Free Software Foundation, Inc.<p>
<hr></hr>
</div>
<span>[*GNU Emacs* buffer END]</span>

<br></br>
<br></br>
<br></br>

<span>[*Get Started* buffer START]</span>
<div id="Get Started">
<hr></hr>
<h2 style="text-align:center;">Getting Started</h2>

<p>You can click on the words highlighted in <span class="ui">blue</span> to locate the corresponding item on the screen.<br/>
You can click on the words highlighted in <span class="action">grey</span> to execute the corresponding action.</p>

<p>The text you are actually reading, is displayed in a <a href="" class="ui">window</a></p>

<p>This window is inside a <a href="" class="ui">frame</a>.</p>

<p>You can open multiple windows inside a frame. For example, to open a new window to the right, you can click on the menu item <a href="" class="action">New Window on Right</a> inside the "File" menu in the <a href="" class="ui">menu bar</a> located at the top of the frame. Each menu item will execute a specific emacs "command" to accomplish a specific task. To close a window you can ... . If you accidently closed this window you can .... or you can close and open emacs again.</p>

<p>The menu bar contains all the commands you need to accomplish all kind of tasks in emacs.</p>

<p>In case you changed your mind and want to cancel a command you have already initiated, you need to press the "g" key while pressing and holding the "Control" key on your keyboard (C-g). You can also press this key combination if you think that a command is taking too much time to complete or is making emacs unresponsive to other commands you are trying to initiate.</p>

<p>You may have noticed that when you opened the new window, a message was displayed in the bar at the bottom of the frame. This bar is called the <a href="" class="ui">echo area</a>. Every action in emacs results in a brief message so you can ... . This message will disappear after a short time or when ... </p>

<p>Some commands you execute may need further input from your side, for example if you execute the search command to search for a specific word or phrase in a specific buffer, you need to provide the word or phrase you are are searching for. When you execute such commands, a brief and persistent message is displayed in the echo area which ends with a colon ":", showing what the command is expecting as input from your side. In this case it is the "Search for string:" message which is inviting you to enter the word or phrase you are searching for. You need to enter these directly after the colon ":". If you want to cancel the search command you need to press (C-g) as describe earlier. If you need to use the search command, you may want to read the documentation about it first in ... .</p>

<p>Each command is documented and you can find its documentation by clicking on ... &lt;&lt;<span style="background-color:yellow">user needs a simple way to access this. Same as clicking on [Help->Describe->Describe Key or Mouse Operation] then selecting the command (he wants) in the menubar (Without using keybindings or using the minibuffer)</span>&gt;&gt;</p>

<p> You can work inside a single window at a time, the one having the focus, this is usually indicated by a blinking <a href="" class="ui">cursor.</a> The cursor is also known as "point" and indicates where the text you are going to type will be inserted.</p>

<p> Each window display a single file content which is called <a href="" class="ui">buffer</a>. To open a new file in the right window, you need to click inside the right window first, to get the focus, and then click on the <a href="" class="ui">"New File" icon</a> in the <a href="" class="ui">toolbar</a>.</p>

<p>The toolbar contains some of the menubar commands for a quick and convenient access.</p>

<p>To close the file displayed in the right window, you need to ... but this will not close the window itself, to close the window you need to repeat the same step described earlier. Closing a window will not close the buffer displayed inside, the buffer will remain opened in emacs and you can display it again in any other window you want.</p>

<p>You can also open some special emacs buffers in a window, like the <a href="" class="action">*Messages*</a> buffer which displays ... and the <a href="" class="action">*Errors*</a> buffer which displays ... . If you encounter any error you may want to search ... first, or send an email to ... or join the IRC channel ... , or ...</p>

<p> Emacs special buffers names are always surrounded by **. The buffer you are actually reading is named *Get Started* as you can see in the <a href="" class="ui">modeline</a>. This buffer replaced the previous buffer that was opened in this window when you first started emacs and which was called <a href="" class="action">*GNU Emacs*</a> (also known as the startup buffer).</p>

<p>Each window has its own modeline. The modeline is used to display ... <a href="" class="ui">flag1</a> ... <a href="" class="ui">flag2</a> ... <a href="" class="ui">buffer name</a> ... <a href="" class="ui">buffer modes ...</a></p>

<p>This is all you need to get started using emacs.</p>

<p>If you want to learn more, you can read the manual:</p>
<ol style="list-style: none; font-size: 15px; line-height: 32px; font-weight: bold;">
<li> <a href="">View Emacs Manual</a>  View the Emacs manual using Info</li>
<li> <a href="">Ordering Manuals</a>   Purchasing printed copies of manuals</li>
</ol>
<p>You may also want to check:</p>
<ol style="list-style: none; font-size: 15px; line-height: 32px; font-weight: bold;">
<li> <a href="">Emacs Tutorial</a>  Learn basic keystroke commands</li>
</ol>

<h2 style="text-align:center;">What is next</h2>

<p>Now that you are familiar with emacs environment, and ready to start using emacs, you may want to customize emacs first to suites your specific needs.</p>

<p>You can customize everything in emacs. For example you can hide the toolbar, the menu bar, the modeline, you can change the items displayed in the modeline, you can change the startup buffer, you can choose to automatically save the files you are editing, and choose when they got saved, you may want to automatically keep a backup of these files too, ...</p>

<p>The following link will help you do that, and in the same time you will be discovering the mostly used features in emacs, you can also have an overview of some of these features in the <a href="">Emacs Guided Tour</a> at gnu.org.</p>

<p>Clicking on this link will execute a command like the ones you initiate from the menubar or the toolbar. This command needs further input from your side for each customization, which you will have to enter in the echo area as usual.</p>

<p>All the customizations have a pre-selected value, you can hit the "Enter" key to keep this value, or you can chose another value ....</p>

<p>You can repeat this step as much as you need, to re-customize emacs, or even to check what are the values for certain customizations. The values in green are the values you have never changed (emacs defaults), the values in red are the ones you have already changed, in a previous run, to a non-default value.</p>

<p>All the customizations will be stored under .... in case you want to backup your customizations, or you want to use the same customizations for another emacs instance running on a different device, without having to repeat this step again.</p>

<h3 style="text-align:center;"><a href="">Start Customizing emacs</a></h3>

<p>If you need a more advanced customizations, or you want to know what other features emacs can offer, you may want to read the emacs manual first, and then use the more advanced <a href="">customization interface.</a></p>

<hr></hr>
</div>
<span>[*Get Started* buffer END]</span>

</body>
</html>

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[chad]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 380 bytes --]

On Wed, Oct 2, 2024 at 1:41 AM Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <jordigh@octave.org>
wrote:

> I was asked to relay this from an anonymous IRC user. The words below are
> not
> mine. I, Jordi, did not write this. Someone wanted to post this
> anonymously to
> emacs-devel, and I'm doing it on their behalf. [...]


Send them this link: https://emacs.amodernist.com/

~Chad

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 810 bytes --]

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:25:40 +0300
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>
> 
> On 09/10/2024 16:13, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > rust-ts-mode is part of
> > Emacs, and could be turned on automatically when a Rust file is
> > visited; we didn't do that because we are unsure whether users of an
> > unbundled Rust mode will protest
> 
> That seems unlikely: as long as the auto-mode-alist configuration for 
> rust-ts-mode is done early on in Emacs's startup, any installed 3rd 
> party package such as rust-mode would add its config later, and thus 
> have priority.

I don't have objections to making Rust recognized automatically and
activating rust-ts-mode, if people think this danger is low or
non-existent, and if *.rs files are not commonly used for something
completely unrelated (e.g., I see on my Windows system quite a few
*.rs files that seem to be some kind of Windows data files).

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Xiyue Deng]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:25:40 +0300
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> From: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>
>> 
>> On 09/10/2024 16:13, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> > rust-ts-mode is part of
>> > Emacs, and could be turned on automatically when a Rust file is
>> > visited; we didn't do that because we are unsure whether users of an
>> > unbundled Rust mode will protest
>> 
>> That seems unlikely: as long as the auto-mode-alist configuration for 
>> rust-ts-mode is done early on in Emacs's startup, any installed 3rd 
>> party package such as rust-mode would add its config later, and thus 
>> have priority.
>
> I don't have objections to making Rust recognized automatically and
> activating rust-ts-mode, if people think this danger is low or
> non-existent, and if *.rs files are not commonly used for something
> completely unrelated (e.g., I see on my Windows system quite a few
> *.rs files that seem to be some kind of Windows data files).
>

One thing to be cautious is that all *-ts-modes require tree-sitter
syntax libraries to be available to use, which are not shipped with
Emacs.

One can follow the instructions on masteringemacs[1], or install
treesit-auto[2] to install tree-sitter syntax libraries, which are not a
lot of trouble but may still be more work than a new comer would expect.

[1] https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/how-to-get-started-tree-sitter
[2] https://github.com/renzmann/treesit-auto

-- 
Regards,
Xiyue Deng

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Emanuel Berg]

Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

>> My analysis is different. Emacs lacks volunteers who'd sit
>> down and write documentation on how to configure Emacs for
>> this or that job.
>
> I think the problem is different: there are already people
> who write documentation on how to configure Emacs for tasks.
> There are also many .emacs.d reppositories.
>
> There are awesome Emacs setups out there, much better than
> what I have.
>
> What's missing is a way to integrate these efforts into
> Emacs so new users can benefit from them.

100%!

Before I write a `defun', I always think, did someone else
already write this exact defun - in Emacs, in GNU ELPA, on
some -hub or some homepage, anywhere?

And the answer is always, "I don't know".

And then I ask: "Okay, but how do I find out then?"

"I don't know."

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Xiyue Deng <manphiz@gmail.com>
> Cc: johan.myreen@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2024 22:14:32 -0700
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:25:40 +0300
> >> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> >> From: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>
> >> 
> >> On 09/10/2024 16:13, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >> > rust-ts-mode is part of
> >> > Emacs, and could be turned on automatically when a Rust file is
> >> > visited; we didn't do that because we are unsure whether users of an
> >> > unbundled Rust mode will protest
> >> 
> >> That seems unlikely: as long as the auto-mode-alist configuration for 
> >> rust-ts-mode is done early on in Emacs's startup, any installed 3rd 
> >> party package such as rust-mode would add its config later, and thus 
> >> have priority.
> >
> > I don't have objections to making Rust recognized automatically and
> > activating rust-ts-mode, if people think this danger is low or
> > non-existent, and if *.rs files are not commonly used for something
> > completely unrelated (e.g., I see on my Windows system quite a few
> > *.rs files that seem to be some kind of Windows data files).
> >
> 
> One thing to be cautious is that all *-ts-modes require tree-sitter
> syntax libraries to be available to use, which are not shipped with
> Emacs.

If a required grammar library is not available, the user gets a
warning.  So what is the problem here?

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Xiyue Deng]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Xiyue Deng <manphiz@gmail.com>
>> Cc: johan.myreen@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2024 22:14:32 -0700
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> >> Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:25:40 +0300
>> >> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> >> From: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>
>> >> 
>> >> On 09/10/2024 16:13, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> >> > rust-ts-mode is part of
>> >> > Emacs, and could be turned on automatically when a Rust file is
>> >> > visited; we didn't do that because we are unsure whether users of an
>> >> > unbundled Rust mode will protest
>> >> 
>> >> That seems unlikely: as long as the auto-mode-alist configuration for 
>> >> rust-ts-mode is done early on in Emacs's startup, any installed 3rd 
>> >> party package such as rust-mode would add its config later, and thus 
>> >> have priority.
>> >
>> > I don't have objections to making Rust recognized automatically and
>> > activating rust-ts-mode, if people think this danger is low or
>> > non-existent, and if *.rs files are not commonly used for something
>> > completely unrelated (e.g., I see on my Windows system quite a few
>> > *.rs files that seem to be some kind of Windows data files).
>> >
>> 
>> One thing to be cautious is that all *-ts-modes require tree-sitter
>> syntax libraries to be available to use, which are not shipped with
>> Emacs.
>
> If a required grammar library is not available, the user gets a
> warning.  So what is the problem here?

Then a user doesn't really getting a useful major mode for editing Rust
files or other programming files when using their *-ts-mode (without
their grammar installed, that is).

Other non-ts based modes, though less accurate, are readily usable after
`M-x package-install', which IMHO is slightly more new user friendly.

Of course, if Emacs provide a built-in way to install the grammar
libraries automatically that would be better.

-- 
Regards,
Xiyue Deng

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>
> Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2024 23:55:16 +0200
> 
> Hello, I was asked to send this to this list; it is from our
> anonymous IRC fried.

Thanks.

> The implementation is mainly about 2 parts:
> 
> 1. part1: "Getting started" (or introduction to emacs).

This is basically an alternative to TUTORIAL.  It describes the Emacs
basics in a different order than the tutorial, and I'm not sure which
one is better.  The advantage of this method is that it's shorter and
introduces the basic concepts right away; the disadvantage is that the
description is necessarily much more abstract, and almost nothing in
it requires the reader to _do_ anything, which IME tends to bore and
lose the reader's attention.

> 2. part2: "What is next" (or emacs customization).
> 
> For part1’s implementation, I had to modify the actual *GNU
> Emacs* startup buffer, so I:
> 
> - moved some links to a new *Get Started* buffer (I have
>   added).
> 
> - kept only what I guess should really be kept.
> 
> - modified/added some texts.
> 
> - added a "Get Started" link which should open the new *Get
>   Started* buffer. (feel free to change the names or anything,
>   as stated previously, the names I chose everywhere are only
>   for demonstration).

I'm probably missing something because in the HTML you posted this
part is basically empty.  It mentions Customize in general terms, but
that's _how_ to customize Emacs, not _what_ to customize.  How is the
user supposed to know which variables/features to customize?

What did I miss?

> 1. part1: Getting Started:
> 
> This part is to introduce user to emacs vocabulary/environment
> in a very quick way, because emacs vocabulary is very special,
> and the ui also like for example the modeline (which is useful
> to start using emacs). Only things that user need to know to
> start using emacs are to be shown, when the user is satisfied
> he will be motivated to read further, and even read the
> manual later.
> 
> Anything which is not really necessary to start using emacs
> like keybindings, packages,..., better be avoided.
> 
> Even the minibuffer, that is why I only mentioned the "echo
> area", new users does not need to know the difference between
> the "echo area" and the minibuffer (if I am not wrong), and
> previous emacs users will understand this as well (because the
> minibuffer is displayed in the "echo area" anyway). New users
> should also not know that they can open multiple frames, to
> start using emacs, etc.
> 
> The introduction should not only be as short as possible, but
> as easy, attractive, entertaining as possible, in other word
> non-boring or difficult to understand.

That's a tough ticket.  There's so much in the Emacs display that is
or might be important that explaining it in a short text is hard, if
not impossible.  For example, the description you posted doesn't
mention the scroll bars, and the description of the mode line is only
hinted upon; filling that with actual information will likely make it
much longer.  I think we'd most welcome attempts to do what you are
trying to do, but it isn't easy.

> 2. part2: What is next (the "customization" part):
> 
> This part can be moved to a separate dedicated *What Is Next*
> buffer, if it is better, as stated above.
> 
> This part is also already described in my previous message (If
> you landed here directly, I encourage you to read the first
> message
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2024-10/msg00018.html).
> 
> This part give a user a fast way to customize emacs to his
> needs, by asking him questions.

This is an idea that has come up before, more than once.  I think
everyone agrees that it's a good idea.  The hard part in this is to
come up with a good sequence of questions, which would address
different usage patterns that Emacs can support.  I don't think I've
seen any attempts to do this which are close to completion, I only saw
this idea being described and discussed, and a few attempts to produce
a starting point.  If you can post the more-or-less full list of
questions (which will probably be a tree or a DAG, not a linear list,
since the user should be asked quite early what are his/her needs that
they want to accomplish with Emacs, and perhaps also what are their UI
preferences.), please do: I think this could be a very good step in
the right direction.

> This is somehow similar to the idea of the actual "Customize
> Startup" link located in the actual *GNU Emacs* startup
> buffer, but this actual link contains only a very limited
> subset and are also not beginner friendly (lot of advanced
> vocabulary that needs user to read the manual first).
> 
> This is also similar to https://emacs.amodernist.com/
> I mentioned in my previous message.

I think https://emacs.amodernist.com/ is a good starting point, but
IMO it is nowhere near being complete.  I see the following ways to
improve it:

  . More background information on the features it asks about, so the
    readers could make up their minds about using them.  For example,
    it asks about Org without actually telling much about it: how is
    the reader supposed to know ehether he/she wants it?  It generally
    assumes that the readers already know what they want and need just
    to be pointed to the Emacs feature which implements some
    functionality.  A good example is "Version Control" -- are we sure
    everyone knows what this is about?
  . It leaves out many popular and important features in Emacs.  One
    notable example is email; another is access to remote files; yet
    another is debugging and the built-in GDB front-end; etc. etc.
  . The "Miscellaneous" section at the end is a very small subset of
    convenience features Emacs offers, and should be greatly expanded
    and classified into groups (otherwise it will be a very large
    unsorted list of unrelated settings, which will be hard to read
    and understand).  It also needs to describe each feature in more
    than just a single sentence.

> I also prefer this "customization" part to be questions asked
> in the minibuffer if possible, and not a a sequence of buffers
> with long texts, checkboxes, buttons, fields,..., like the
> "customization interface".

If you want to code a customization interface that is based on asking
questions, then doing that for complex values might be difficult or
cumbersome.  As a simple example, how do you propose to let users to
customize a face by asking questions instead of having checkboxes and
fields?  The basic disadvantage of asking one question at a time is
that the user doesn't see the whole picture, and also that there's no
easy way of going back to a previous question and answering it in a
different way.

> Imagine a developer who needs a code editor with a LSP client,
> and he does not know anything at all about emacs and also
> about some other editor. Compare the time he needs to use
> emacs as a LSP client with auto-complete, and the time he
> needs to use the other editor as LSP client with
> auto-complete. He needs to spend at least days, if not weeks
> to understand many things about emacs and have something
> useful to work with.

If a developer already knows about LSP, and already decided LSP server
is the best solution for what the developer has in mind, then yes.
But what if the developer doesn't know about the alternatives Emacs
provides that don't require an LSP client?  Setting up an LSP server
is not a trivial task, so if Emacs provides an alternative, the
customization helper you describe should give enough information for
the developer to consider these alternatives and make up his/her mind
about the one best for him/her.  E.g., many people don't know about
etags and the many languages it supports, or about ElDoc and its
backends other than LSP-driven Eglot.  IMO, the customization wizard
should mention those.

> Some users may instead be interested in (or prefer) reading
> the manual first, and using the customization interface or
> manually editing the init file, why not, but even here, many
> do not have enough time to do that, so they let it go.

We don't recommend reading the manual in its entirety anywhere.
Instead, we recommend reading those chapters and sections in the
manual that are relevant to the job in hand.  The manuals are well
indexed and organized to allow this method and to make it
time-efficient for our users.

Thanks again for working on these important aspects of Emacs.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org> writes:

>> Therefore we ask people to avoid sarcasm in our discussions.
>> See https://gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html.
>
> Yes, I know, and I agree. You could add a paragraph what you
> should do when you feel hurt.

That is a good point, though not a simple one.

> "did this person intend to be a jerk to you?"

That’s the common method of "putting yourself in their shoes".

I just checked if nonviolent communication could be an option, but that
doesn’t fit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#Components

And sadly there’s no Englisch version of the page about Streitkultur:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streitkultur#Streitkultur_lernen

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> This is also similar to https://emacs.amodernist.com/
>> I mentioned in my previous message.
>
> I think https://emacs.amodernist.com/ is a good starting point, but
> IMO it is nowhere near being complete.  I see the following ways to
> improve it:
>
>   . More background information on the features it asks about, so the

This is an indication that asking is the wrong approach.

We can only ask questions that users can give an informed answer to. If
we need more than a few words to give that information, then asking the
users puts an undue strain on them.

If questions require lots of reading to understand the answers (or their
implications), we should provide a default and enable already informed
users to deviate from the default. And maybe provide links for further
reading for those who want to dig.

To avoid causing problems to those who want to tinker, an option like
"minimalistic" could help. That would disable all potentially
conflicting customizations.

> Setting up an LSP server is not a trivial task, so if Emacs provides
> an alternative, the customization helper you describe should give
> enough information for the developer to consider these alternatives
> and make up his/her mind about the one best for him/her.

Also my experience with the difference between js2-mode and the
typescript (ts) lsp is that js2-mode is much, much more enjoyable to
use, because it feels instantaneous while the lsp always causes delays.

But js2-mode only works for Javascript (maybe with jsdoc), but not for
Typescript. That’s why I know the difference.

I don’t know whether it is the same for other lsp servers and their
provided alternatives, but if it is, then suggesting an lsp may not be
the best.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 11:35:12 +0200
> 
> If questions require lots of reading to understand the answers (or their
> implications), we should provide a default and enable already informed
> users to deviate from the default. And maybe provide links for further
> reading for those who want to dig.

That's basically what we already do: our defaults are set up like
that, except that we are very conservative with changing them, and so
might decide to adapt to some changes quite some time after the
changes happened.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > We generally try to make all sorts of packages for various uses of
  > Emacs coexist in a single Emacs job.  I get the impression people are
  > assuming that these different configurations are mutually incompatible,
  > so that it is necessary to choose which one to install.

  > Is that what people assume?  If people do, why so?  Why can't
  > users select one at run time?

In general we make it possible for a single Emacs job to
contain various different configurations at the same time,
and the user can switch between them,  Usually it is controlled
by which buffer is current.

Am I right in thinking that Spacemacs and Doom require the
user to choose at an earlier stage?  Or did the descriptions
posted here give me the wrong impression?

If I understood that point correctly, is there any inherent reason why
we could not in Emacs offer the sorts of configurations that Spacemacs
and Doom do, but designed such that they can coexist in a single Emacs
job, perhaps with the current buffer controlling which one is active?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> Am I right in thinking that Spacemacs and Doom require the
> user to choose at an earlier stage?  Or did the descriptions
> posted here give me the wrong impression?

At least Doom provides collections of packages for specific tasks.
That way it’s a bit more abstract — but maintenance of parts of the
configuration is shifted from the user to Doom.

The downside of that is that a friend who used it regularly complained
that after updating Doom, the configuration was broken, so I do not
think that just copying that model would be a good idea.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 10/10/2024 07:56, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> That seems unlikely: as long as the auto-mode-alist configuration for
>> rust-ts-mode is done early on in Emacs's startup, any installed 3rd
>> party package such as rust-mode would add its config later, and thus
>> have priority.
> I don't have objections to making Rust recognized automatically and
> activating rust-ts-mode, if people think this danger is low or
> non-existent, and if *.rs files are not commonly used for something
> completely unrelated (e.g., I see on my Windows system quite a few
> *.rs files that seem to be some kind of Windows data files).

Actually, thinking back the last time we made such a move, we got a 
report from a user who preferred to have files in question (*.toml) in 
fundamental-mode, because they didn't want the hassle of installing the 
toml tree-sitter grammar (bug#60559).

The said user didn't have Emacs compiled with tree-sitter, so if we 
wanted to revisit that issue, we could enable ts mode globally when 
Emacs is compiled with that support, and when it isn't, keep them out of 
auto-mode-alist.

That could still lead to inconveniences sometimes, but at the very least 
it would follow the reporter's request from down the thread:

> If emacs was configured with tree-sitter, it seems productive to
warn the user when tree-sitter grammars are missing.  It seems
likely that user intended to have tree-sitter.

> When emacs is NOT configured with tree-sitter, it seems
counter-productive to warn about missing tree-sitter.

> I even pass --without-tree-sitter to configure now.  It seems
particularly surprising to me that I explicitly tell emacs "don't
use tree-sitter" and then it immediately starts complaining to me
that it doesn't have tree-sitter.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > The downside of that is that a friend who used it regularly complained
  > that after updating Doom, the configuration was broken, so I do not
  > think that just copying that model would be a good idea.

I'm simply trying to clarify what sort of feature we are aiming for.
How to implement it would ne the next question, and since I don't know
anything about how Doom implements it, I am not arguing for or against
using the same approach.

Once we have it clear what features we want, we can come up with a good
implementation.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2024 23:30:12 +0300
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>
> Cc: johan.myreen@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> On 10/10/2024 07:56, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >> That seems unlikely: as long as the auto-mode-alist configuration for
> >> rust-ts-mode is done early on in Emacs's startup, any installed 3rd
> >> party package such as rust-mode would add its config later, and thus
> >> have priority.
> > I don't have objections to making Rust recognized automatically and
> > activating rust-ts-mode, if people think this danger is low or
> > non-existent, and if *.rs files are not commonly used for something
> > completely unrelated (e.g., I see on my Windows system quite a few
> > *.rs files that seem to be some kind of Windows data files).
> 
> Actually, thinking back the last time we made such a move, we got a 
> report from a user who preferred to have files in question (*.toml) in 
> fundamental-mode, because they didn't want the hassle of installing the 
> toml tree-sitter grammar (bug#60559).
> 
> The said user didn't have Emacs compiled with tree-sitter, so if we 
> wanted to revisit that issue, we could enable ts mode globally when 
> Emacs is compiled with that support, and when it isn't, keep them out of 
> auto-mode-alist.

If we want to be selective, we should also check if the grammar
library is installed.

Or we could tell the user, when a Rust file is first visited and the
grammar is not available, that we recommend to install the grammar.

Either way, this is not very trivial, and someone should do the work
of designing the best UI and coding it.

> > I even pass --without-tree-sitter to configure now.  It seems
> particularly surprising to me that I explicitly tell emacs "don't
> use tree-sitter" and then it immediately starts complaining to me
> that it doesn't have tree-sitter.

Feel free to improve what we have.  My point is that it is not very
trivial; what we have is basically a compromise, which could be
improved, at least for some languages, if we want to be smarter.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 12/10/2024 10:34, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> Actually, thinking back the last time we made such a move, we got a
>> report from a user who preferred to have files in question (*.toml) in
>> fundamental-mode, because they didn't want the hassle of installing the
>> toml tree-sitter grammar (bug#60559).
>>
>> The said user didn't have Emacs compiled with tree-sitter, so if we
>> wanted to revisit that issue, we could enable ts mode globally when
>> Emacs is compiled with that support, and when it isn't, keep them out of
>> auto-mode-alist.
> 
> If we want to be selective, we should also check if the grammar
> library is installed.
> 
> Or we could tell the user, when a Rust file is first visited and the
> grammar is not available, that we recommend to install the grammar.

Telling that the grammar is not installed is still useful. Even if we 
say "grammar xyz not available" only once per session, we still have to 
decide whether the major mode switch happens (with perhaps reduced 
features - such as non-working indentation/font-lock/etc, but with for 
example Eglot recognizing the file type now).

> Either way, this is not very trivial, and someone should do the work
> of designing the best UI and coding it.
> 
>>> I even pass --without-tree-sitter to configure now.  It seems
>> particularly surprising to me that I explicitly tell emacs "don't
>> use tree-sitter" and then it immediately starts complaining to me
>> that it doesn't have tree-sitter.
> 
> Feel free to improve what we have.  My point is that it is not very
> trivial; what we have is basically a compromise, which could be
> improved, at least for some languages, if we want to be smarter.

The proposal I'm quoting is straightforward: if Emacs is compiled with 
tree-sitter support, enable the modes and warn when the grammars are not 
available. If Emacs is not compiled with tree-sitter, do neither.

That kind of rule has predictability: for example if the grammar was not 
installed originally but the user did that while Emacs was running, the 
corresponding major mode will start working the next time the user tries 
to enable it. That wouldn't be the case if we conditionally alter 
auto-mode-alist based on grammar availability.

The above approach should be quite easy to implement, if there's 
agreement to it. Otherwise, the issue is about choosing the details of 
the UI first.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:

> The proposal I'm quoting is straightforward: if Emacs is compiled with
> tree-sitter support, enable the modes and warn when the grammars are
> not available. If Emacs is not compiled with tree-sitter, do neither.

This sounds like having external grammars is a UX problem.

Are they so big that they cannot be included?

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

Does each of the variant Emacs vesions, such as Spacemavcs and Doom,
customize a set of options ab initio, regardless of what sort of
of text you are editing?

If so, I have an idea for how Emacs could help a user try each of those
ccllections of customizations.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > I think https://emacs.amodernist.com/ is a good starting point, but
  > IMO it is nowhere near being complete.

That site looks like a good approach to me, but we should beware of trying
to make it "complete", because that would make it so many questions
thta it would overload beginners, and even not-quite-beginners.
It needs to selectively show only fairly important options.

It should limit itself to things that  are part of Emacs: core and GNU
ELPA.  Things that we recommend in Emacs should not depend on packages
in NonGNU ELPA.
-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2024 23:27:01 +0300
> Cc: johan.myreen@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>
> 
> > Feel free to improve what we have.  My point is that it is not very
> > trivial; what we have is basically a compromise, which could be
> > improved, at least for some languages, if we want to be smarter.
> 
> The proposal I'm quoting is straightforward: if Emacs is compiled with 
> tree-sitter support, enable the modes and warn when the grammars are not 
> available. If Emacs is not compiled with tree-sitter, do neither.
> 
> That kind of rule has predictability: for example if the grammar was not 
> installed originally but the user did that while Emacs was running, the 
> corresponding major mode will start working the next time the user tries 
> to enable it. That wouldn't be the case if we conditionally alter 
> auto-mode-alist based on grammar availability.
> 
> The above approach should be quite easy to implement, if there's 
> agreement to it. Otherwise, the issue is about choosing the details of 
> the UI first.

It is not clear which modes you suggest that should behave like that.
Surely, not all of them, i.e. including those for which non-TS modes
are part of Emacs?

And yes, I would like to hear from more people what they think about
the possible behaviors in these cases, including how to handle missing
grammar libraries.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  johan.myreen@gmail.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2024 23:00:16 +0200
> 
> Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:
> 
> > The proposal I'm quoting is straightforward: if Emacs is compiled with
> > tree-sitter support, enable the modes and warn when the grammars are
> > not available. If Emacs is not compiled with tree-sitter, do neither.
> 
> This sounds like having external grammars is a UX problem.

It is a UI problem because users could have a TS-enabled Emacs, but
not grammar libraries for the language(s) he/she wants to edit.  The
problem in that case is how to present this situation to the user.

> Are they so big that they cannot be included?

They are not large, but they are written in C or C++ and are developed
by their own teams in their own repositories.  They are also a lot
when taken together (e.g., my personal collection includes more than
70 grammar libraries, and even what we have in core needs almost 20
different libraries).  So we cannot distribute them as part of Emacs
source tarballs.

If you are talking about what downstream Emacs distros do for
packaging, that's a separate issue on which we have no control.  But
if a distro packages grammar libraries, it could also enable the
corresponding modes in their customizations of Emacs.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Are they so big that they cannot be included?
>
> They are not large, but they are written in C or C++ and are developed
> by their own teams in their own repositories.  They are also a lot
> when taken together (e.g., my personal collection includes more than
> 70 grammar libraries, and even what we have in core needs almost 20
> different libraries).  So we cannot distribute them as part of Emacs
> source tarballs.

Then that’s technical and organisatorial; sounds like we have to live
with that for now.

I wasn’t aware that it’s so much. Thank you for explaining!

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 13/10/2024 07:41, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> The proposal I'm quoting is straightforward: if Emacs is compiled with
>> tree-sitter support, enable the modes and warn when the grammars are not
>> available. If Emacs is not compiled with tree-sitter, do neither.
>>
>> That kind of rule has predictability: for example if the grammar was not
>> installed originally but the user did that while Emacs was running, the
>> corresponding major mode will start working the next time the user tries
>> to enable it. That wouldn't be the case if we conditionally alter
>> auto-mode-alist based on grammar availability.
>>
>> The above approach should be quite easy to implement, if there's
>> agreement to it. Otherwise, the issue is about choosing the details of
>> the UI first.
> 
> It is not clear which modes you suggest that should behave like that.
> Surely, not all of them, i.e. including those for which non-TS modes
> are part of Emacs?

I don't have a strong opinion on which set should be enabled - maybe 
just all TS modes which we don't have built-in counterparts. Maybe not 
even toml-ts-mode, since there is conf-toml-mode.

Maybe make some exceptions for TS modes that provide significantly 
better functionality than the classic ones. Not sure which ones.

What I think is important, though, is avoiding major mode functions 
modiying auto-mode-alist at runtime.

> And yes, I would like to hear from more people what they think about
> the possible behaviors in these cases, including how to handle missing
> grammar libraries.

Everybody's welcome to chime in.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2024 12:37:38 +0300
> Cc: johan.myreen@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>
> 
> > It is not clear which modes you suggest that should behave like that.
> > Surely, not all of them, i.e. including those for which non-TS modes
> > are part of Emacs?
> 
> I don't have a strong opinion on which set should be enabled - maybe 
> just all TS modes which we don't have built-in counterparts. Maybe not 
> even toml-ts-mode, since there is conf-toml-mode.
> 
> Maybe make some exceptions for TS modes that provide significantly 
> better functionality than the classic ones.

I tend to agree.

> What I think is important, though, is avoiding major mode functions 
> modiying auto-mode-alist at runtime.

But CC Mode already does, and always did?

> > And yes, I would like to hear from more people what they think about
> > the possible behaviors in these cases, including how to handle missing
> > grammar libraries.
> 
> Everybody's welcome to chime in.

Right.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:

> On 13/10/2024 07:41, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> And yes, I would like to hear from more people what they think about
>> the possible behaviors in these cases, including how to handle missing
>> grammar libraries.
>
> Everybody's welcome to chime in.

Since the grammar libraries are compiled code: is automatically
downloading them a risk of remote code execution errors?

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dmitry Gutov]

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On Sun, Oct 13, 2024, at 12:39 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2024 12:37:38 +0300
> > Cc: johan.myreen@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > From: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>
> > 
> > > It is not clear which modes you suggest that should behave like that.
> > > Surely, not all of them, i.e. including those for which non-TS modes
> > > are part of Emacs?
> > 
> > I don't have a strong opinion on which set should be enabled - maybe 
> > just all TS modes which we don't have built-in counterparts. Maybe not 
> > even toml-ts-mode, since there is conf-toml-mode.
> > 
> > Maybe make some exceptions for TS modes that provide significantly 
> > better functionality than the classic ones.
> 
> I tend to agree.
> 
> > What I think is important, though, is avoiding major mode functions 
> > modiying auto-mode-alist at runtime.
> 
> But CC Mode already does, and always did?
I don't think so: those alterations happen in 'autoload' blocks, which means that it happens either during Emacs' startup, or during package initialization, if cc-mode is installed as an ELPA package.

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Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2024 17:31:33 +0200
> From: "Dmitry Gutov" <dmitry@gutov.dev>
> Cc: johan.myreen@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> On Sun, Oct 13, 2024, at 12:39 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
>  > What I think is important, though, is avoiding major mode functions 
>  > modiying auto-mode-alist at runtime.
> 
>  But CC Mode already does, and always did?
> 
> I don't think so: those alterations happen in 'autoload' blocks, which means that it happens either during
> Emacs' startup, or during package initialization, if cc-mode is installed as an ELPA package.

In any case, I don't understand what is so sacred about
auto-mode-alist that it should not be modified at run time.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 13/10/2024 18:53, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> In any case, I don't understand what is so sacred about
> auto-mode-alist that it should not be modified at run time.

The ad-hoc behaviors the creates and offers the users, or the bugs like 
'C-h f' altering auto-mode-alist, or 'M-x js-ts-mode' (for example) 
doing the same because it loads cc-mode.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Dmitry.

On Mon, Oct 14, 2024 at 12:32:31 +0300, Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> On 13/10/2024 18:53, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > In any case, I don't understand what is so sacred about
> > auto-mode-alist that it should not be modified at run time.

> The ad-hoc behaviors the creates and offers the users, or the bugs like 
> 'C-h f' altering auto-mode-alist, or 'M-x js-ts-mode' (for example) 
> doing the same because it loads cc-mode.

Not sure exactly what you mean there.  With emacs -Q, the CC Mode
entries are already on auto-mode-alist.  Does anything more happen with
M-x js-ts-mode?

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2024 12:32:31 +0300
> Cc: johan.myreen@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>
> 
> On 13/10/2024 18:53, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > In any case, I don't understand what is so sacred about
> > auto-mode-alist that it should not be modified at run time.
> 
> The ad-hoc behaviors the creates and offers the users, or the bugs like 
> 'C-h f' altering auto-mode-alist, or 'M-x js-ts-mode' (for example) 
> doing the same because it loads cc-mode.

We have such issues all over the place in Emacs: "C-h" commands that
load packages modify the global state.  There's nothing new here, nor
anything outlandish.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 14/10/2024 17:16, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> The ad-hoc behaviors the creates and offers the users, or the bugs like
>> 'C-h f' altering auto-mode-alist, or 'M-x js-ts-mode' (for example)
>> doing the same because it loads cc-mode.
> We have such issues all over the place in Emacs: "C-h" commands that
> load packages modify the global state.  There's nothing new here, nor
> anything outlandish.

It might not be a huge deal, but packages being loaded at various times, 
sometimes unexpected, is why we try to avoid doing too many things 
during that time.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dmitry Gutov]

Hi Alan,

On 14/10/2024 14:09, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>> The ad-hoc behaviors the creates and offers the users, or the bugs like
>> 'C-h f' altering auto-mode-alist, or 'M-x js-ts-mode' (for example)
>> doing the same because it loads cc-mode.
> Not sure exactly what you mean there.  With emacs -Q, the CC Mode
> entries are already on auto-mode-alist.  Does anything more happen with
> M-x js-ts-mode?

I'd rather not get into full detail right now (not filing a bug report), 
we can treat it as an outline of a scenario which could happen with 
different modes anyway if they are allowed to alter a-m-a during package 
loading.

Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2024 04:36:55 +0300
> Cc: johan.myreen@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>
> 
> On 14/10/2024 17:16, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >> The ad-hoc behaviors the creates and offers the users, or the bugs like
> >> 'C-h f' altering auto-mode-alist, or 'M-x js-ts-mode' (for example)
> >> doing the same because it loads cc-mode.
> > We have such issues all over the place in Emacs: "C-h" commands that
> > load packages modify the global state.  There's nothing new here, nor
> > anything outlandish.
> 
> It might not be a huge deal, but packages being loaded at various times, 
> sometimes unexpected, is why we try to avoid doing too many things 
> during that time.

I agree that we should try to avoid that if possible, but you
originally made a stronger argument, or so I interpreted it.