Re: send-invisible is not an obvious name

[Francesco Potorti` <pot@gnu.org>]

> > I had to enter my password and since I knew that a command
> > existed to do that I tried to gess its name, to no avail.  I had to do a
> > search for `password' in the manual to find it.
> 
> I'd say that's what you're supposed to do, and if you could find it by
> searching the manual, then things are working properly.  We can't encode
> documentation into all function names!

I was not clear.  I had to look in the manual and to a M-s password RET,
which is not the normal way, and found obviously many instances of the
word before finding what I was looking for.

Okay, this may be a shortcoming of the manual, and indexing
send-invisible properly would correct the problem.

What I meant is that it is not reasonable that a user should look in the
manual for such a basic functionality.  It should be immediate and
natural.

[about a mneu entry]
> That would be reasonable; however I think `Send input invisibly' (or
> `without echoing') is a pretty good title for this menu entry...

Tha would do.  But it makes no sense to a user.  It only makes sense to
a programmer.  The user only wants to write invisibly when entering a
password, and that is what he is looking for.  A programmer knows that
this is only an instance of a wider range of possibilities, but as for
the practical usage, that function is in fact made for passwords, so the
generalization in the name is only theoretical.