A new filter-based customization interface

A new filter-based customization interface

[Moakt Temporary Email]

Hi everyone,

I am proposing a new beginner-friendly customization interface, which would make emacs more attractive for newcomers, be it actual developers, future developers to be, and even non-developers (writers, students, professors, teachers, etc.), and any lambda person having interest in using emacs.

I added a screenshot of what such an interface might look like (which is better than words).
https://justpaste.it/fdau4.

The main idea of this customization interface is to help users quickly and easily customize emacs for the actual task(s) they need, by providing familiar filters so they can quickly select and access the relevant customizations.

For example, they can select “irc”, “ide”, “agenda”, “completion”, “version control”, “c++”, etc, to filter the customizations relevant to use emacs as an IRC client, IDE, etc.

Today this not possible, and would require new users days and weeks to configure emacs, which would discourage and thus discard lot of them from using emacs.

Do you think this is something achievable in emacs ?
Do you think the actual customization interface can be enhanced to include these changes ? Or should it be a new separate interface ?

I have added all the details about this idea here:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2024-12/msg00174.html
(It is too long to read, that is why I am sending this separate message).

Thank you

Re: A new filter-based customization interface

[Philip Kaludercic]

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Moakt Temporary Email <emacs-devel-proposal@drmail.in> writes:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I am proposing a new beginner-friendly customization interface, which
> would make emacs more attractive for newcomers, be it actual
> developers, future developers to be, and even non-developers (writers,
> students, professors, teachers, etc.), and any lambda person having
> interest in using emacs.
>
> I added a screenshot of what such an interface might look like (which is better than words).
> https://justpaste.it/fdau4.

As this site is rather slow, here is the same image attached to this
message:


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[-- Attachment #3: Type: text/plain, Size: 1701 bytes --]


> The main idea of this customization interface is to help users quickly
> and easily customize emacs for the actual task(s) they need, by
> providing familiar filters so they can quickly select and access the
> relevant customizations.
>
> For example, they can select “irc”, “ide”, “agenda”, “completion”,
> “version control”, “c++”, etc, to filter the customizations relevant
> to use emacs as an IRC client, IDE, etc.

My question is how this is worse or better than having some kind of
attributes added to user options and then having a
`customise-group'-like command that presents all suggested "irc", "ide",
"agenda", ... options.

But generally speaking, it seems that beginners are not interested in
being overburdened with all the things they can decide on (even if this
is categorised), but rather to have as many thing as possible to DTRT OOTB.

> Today this not possible, and would require new users days and weeks to configure emacs, which would discourage and thus discard lot of them from using emacs.
>
> Do you think this is something achievable in emacs ?
> Do you think the actual customization interface can be enhanced to include these changes ? Or should it be a new separate interface ?

I tend to feel that it would be better to have a separate UI with fewer
choices (beginners are probably not /that/ interested in the differences
between saving something for this session or permanently, I'd think?).

> I have added all the details about this idea here:
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2024-12/msg00174.html
> (It is too long to read, that is why I am sending this separate message).
>
> Thank you

Re: A new filter-based customization interface

[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 looked at the image you sent.  I supposed it is supposed to be
self-explanatory, but as often happens for graphical interfaces, I
can't tell the meaning of what I see.


In order for a graphica interface to be natural and self-evident,
it should to be clear just by looking what each visual item means.
Is it an alternative you can select?
Is it a heading which describes the role of whatever follows?
Is it a command you can click on to control the interface?
These things are not clear to me.

Here are some of the visuak aspects for which the meaning is not clear to me.

* There is a bunch of lines at the top which start with
    Filter by
    1. categoryL 
    interfaceL modeline tookbar,..
    general: startup quit backup...

What do tese names mean?  Are they related to custom group names?
Some of them sare names of custom groups, but some are not.
What does each of these names mean?

* Is that an exhaustive list of all "categories"?
* If so, are you supposed to click on one to select it?
* Or are some categories someho selexted now, and this is a list of the
ones that are selected right now?

* How does the fact that a category is selected
affect what happens in the rest of this display?

The next thing it says is

  Sort by: package

What does that mean?  Is "package" one of several psople choices?  If
so, what are the other possible choices and how do you specify another choice?

Then it says

  Selected Customizations:

What does that expression "selected customizations" mean?  What
determines which customizations are selected?  How do you control
which ones are selected?  And what do you achieve by controlling that?

How does this relate to M-x customize...?
It looks like the names of these things do NOT match names of user options.

Each item and value seem to be followed by some sort of classification,
but what do they mean?  They do not seem to be custom groups.
Where are they defined?  For instance, two say :modeline:,  What does
that indicate?

What does [X] mean?  Does it mean "this is enabled"?
If so, what indicates "this is not enabled"?


-- 
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)