Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date)

[Michael Toomim <toomim@cs.berkeley.edu>]

Miles Bader wrote:
> "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:
> 
>>As for buffers, I disagree that it's unused in the context used by
>>Emacs.  I've seen several editors that do the same.
> 
> 
> And anyway, buffers are _not_ the same as `files' or `documents', and
> indeed, the name quite accurately describes what it does (and
> corresponds directly to the concept of a buffer you say you're used to
> doing OS work).  Sometimes there's a one-to-one correspondence between
> buffers and files, but quite often there's not.  Once a user learns
> about this, he can use this advantage.

The term "buffer" means nothing to a new emacs user, even if they thoroughly 
understand the dictionary definition of it.

It would make much more sense to new users if they were just called files or 
documents, since that's what they are to newbies, and learning what a buffer 
is is a big hurdle one has to jump over when learning emacs.

Calling them documents or files wouldn't be that bad.  If they don't exist on 
disk, the users can just think of them as "files that haven't been saved yet". 
  Most text editors call these things "documents", and users tend to have no 
problem incorporating the the fact that they might not have been saved into 
their cognitive model of the system.

Then you have to deal with all the *other* buffers... (dired, help, info...) 
Maybe to do this right, one would have to come up with two entirely different 
names for these different types of buffers (sort of a terminology API built on 
top of buffers).  But I think that the term "document" might apply ok to them 
as well in a user interface... I don't think that the slight strangeness would 
be too much of a problem.  Of course, this is all just intuition.