Re: Emacs Book Vs Emacs Manuals

[MBR <mbr@arlsoft.com>]

What about trying a different approach?  Telling them, "Learn Emacs.  
You'll find it useful in the long run," is guaranteed to make them hate 
it.  It's like being told, "Eat your vegetables.  They're good for you."

Instead, why not challenge them to do some task whose end result they'll 
consider useful, but that you know will be a royal pain in the ass to do 
with a simple-minded text editor.  Make sure it's not something 
contrived.  Tell them to use whatever editor they're most comfortable 
with. After 15 min. or more of tedious editing in their underpowered, 
brain-dead editor, show them that you can do the same thing in 15 
seconds using some general-purpose Emacs feature.

I say "general-purpose Emacs feature" because it's important that they 
see that they could use this functionality for lots of tasks they run 
into all the time.  So I wouldn't choose C-M-q, (i.e. c-indent-exp) 
because that's too specific to a single task. Instead, how about 
something like C-x (,  (i.e. kmacro-start-macro) followed by C-x e (i.e. 
kmacro-end-and-call-macro) with a large repeat count.  You can reformat 
from any format to damned near any other format just by showing Emacs 
how to do it once and then repeating it.  And telling Emacs to remember 
and replay what you just typed is much easier for a newbie to comprehend 
than doing it with a regular expression.

Even better than you showing off would be to plant a shill in the 
crowd.  All you need is one student who already knows some Emacs. Then 
when he's finished in under a minute and they're still tediously slaving 
away 15 or 20 minutes later, they're going to be asking him how the hell 
he did it so fast.  He'll sell Emacs for you.

If you start off by showing (not telling) them Emacs' value, I bet there 
will be a lot less grumbling about having to learn a few unfamiliar 
keystrokes for navigating.

    Mark Rosenthal

On 5/10/15 10:01 AM, Rusi wrote:
> On Sunday, May 10, 2015 at 8:18:20 AM UTC+5:30, Bob Proulx wrote:
>> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>>> Bob Proulx wrote:
>>>> A student says that they really want to learn Calculus.  They know
>>>> that Calculus is very powerful and can be used to solve many problems.
>>>> I suggest that they learn Arithmetic first.  They respond,
>>>> "Arithmetic!  Have you learned Arithmetic?  Arithmetic is old.  Should
>>>> I learn Arithmetic?  For example, will Arithmetic talk about
>>>> Calculus?"
>>> Nice try;-).  But this analogy is flawed: software, unlike mathematical
>>> theories, is subject to change.
>> Has emacs changed that much?  I don't think it has.  It is still very
>> much the same.
> Sad but true
>
> After 20 years of using, teaching with, and making my students use emacs,
> for the first time this year I taught python using Idle rather than emacs.
> Some nuisances... C-a now means Select-all whereas my nerve-pathways know it as
> Beginning-of-line etc etc
> Also some sadness... however one needs to get real and selling emacs to students
> has led to lot of funny looks and some significant hostility.
>
> The tutorial with C-f C-b... for cursor movements was I guess the last straw
>
> What I describe may sound like exaggeration but that's only because I am trying to
> reconstruct what happens between noob and emacs when I am not around.
>
> Student starts reading tutorial and sees the C-f C-b stuff:
>
> - Some follow it wonder about the weirdness but then get on with it
> - Some just use cursor keys like the rest of the planet ignore the C-f C-b
> stuff and get on with it
> - But a few notice that cursor keys work as they should but is not documented
> and are a bit confused/bewildered
> - And of those few, a few get real HOSTILE
>
> Now if the cursor-keys didn't work it would not be so bad
> And ideal would be for them to work AND be documented
> But works and NOT documented/demoed in tutorial... and there are serious
> allegations of ATTITUDE!
>
> [And I am implicated with the emacs-devs :-) ]
>