Re: GNU Emacs raison d'etre

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

xristos <xristos@sdf.org> writes:

> A lot of Emacs users, even old users, don't see Emacs as anything more than
> an editor and haven't been exposed to the "moldable information processing
> tool" way of thinking. This should be addressed by us doing everything we
> can to shorten the time needed for a new user to first be fully exposed
> to this paradigm and subsequently ignite the molding process.
Completely agree on that one!

> I see João admit that he's not familiar with a lot of the C-h commands.
> This is a problem that should be easy to fix. I've long seen the Emacs
> tutorial as unnecessarily narrow-minded in its focus on text editing.
> Richard mentioned a robot game but I suggest the tutorial be reworked
> instead to be much more extensive. It should first lay out the models that
> make Emacs powerful and then through exercises expose the user to said
> models and reinforce the central paradigm.
Yes, indeed,  you are onto something here. It would be nice if there
were different smaller tutorials, for example one for text, one for file
managing, one for email etc. I guess everybody could agree with that,
and probably only reason why it didn't happened yet is because somebody
actually have to produce those, which is not as trivial as it might
sound, I guess. There are some floating resources, tutorial-like blog
posts, some YT content etc. I don't know if Emacs could link to those
as extra resources etc.

When we already speak about tutorial, I think it could pick up shortcuts
uses have and automatically show those instead of saying something like
"default shortcut changed" or something similar, I don't remember any
more what it says. Is that very hard to do?

> That should include familiarization with all introspective commands,
> configuration and customization, how buffers and processes work, and a
> practical introduction to Emacs Lisp, including showing IELM and what one
> can do inside it (e.g. Set working buffer).
Yeah, a tutorial on help, a tutorial och semantic navigation, a tutorial
on remote editing, etc. A set of more focused shorter tutorials. But as
said I am affraid that the problem is that somebody has to put
voluntarily work into making this, which might take substantial time.

> I think this would go a long way towards letting users have a glimpse of
> the possibilities on offer.
Sure, I agree.