Re: guided tour suggestions

["David House" <dmhouse@gmail.com>]

On 02/06/07, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
> * There could be a *grep* or *compilation* screenshot, perhaps showing
> another window with found source code.

We could do the traditional IDE screenshot with grep, compilation,
speedbar and so on buffers open.

> * There could be a screenshot showing incremental search. It should be
> repeated in the search section.

I agree. Incremental search is both one of Emacs's most useful and
most GUI-heavy features, I'd love to see screenshots for both
incremental search and query-replace.

> * I would lose the tetris screenshot. If the point is to show that Emacs has
> play activities too, I'd skip this shot. Compared to play things available
> elsewhere, this is not very convincing. Better to show a good conversation
> with the shrink. I'd skip this stuff altogether, personally.

Keeping a screenshot for something like tetris, blackbox or doctor
would be nice in terms of keeping a more lightweight feel to the
article. They also give the impression that Emacs really does have
everything. I vote for keeping them.

> * Put the hexl screenshot last, if at all.

Agreed. Who uses hexl more than, say, dired?

> I agree. In fact, I vote for turning on delete-selection-mode by default.

Yes, me too.

> I'm not sure what I think about the presentation of Undo. It is generally
> clear, but it looks a bit intimidating because of the diagrams. If we keep
> the diagrams, perhaps add a diagram showing Emacs undo that corresponds to
> the first two diagrams. We don't see Emacs undo until the discussion of
> accessing the past after performing a non-undo/redo action. That is, we only
> see an Emacs undo chain that corresponds to the 3rd diagram.

I really found these diagrams helpful. Emacs does have a rather funky
undo policy with respect to the rest of the editors on this planet,
and it's worth explaining to avoid confusion. It's also a nice example
of how Emacs does things differently to be more powerful.

> What feature is not useful? "Useful features" even includes
> phases-of-the-moon, which is hardly an example of "Integration with common
> tools". No need to mention such stuff, IMO; users will appreciate it more
> when they find it, as an "extra" (a la easter egg).

Again, I'd like to keep this in, for the sake of humour and to give
the impression that Emacs has everything you'd ever want, and then
some.

> We might mention more about Emacs's features for editing code. Things such
> as indentation that we take for granted, for instance.

Agreed. Emacs should be pushed primarily as a coding platform.

-- 
-David House, dmhouse@gmail.com