Re: Emacs Book Vs Emacs Manuals

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Date: Fri, 08 May 2015 18:06:22 -0400
> 
> > What's a tutorial about an editor supposed to start with, if not basic
> > cursor motion?
> 
> I think most users will already have used some kind of text editor
> (e.g. text box in a browser, notepad, textedit, you name it, ...), so
> they probably "know" how to navigate the text and aren't interested in
> that, as a start.

We could tell them to skip these sections if they want to (and don't
know how to skip without being told).

But anyhow, that's how an editor's tutorial usually starts.  E.g.,
look at the one for Vim.

> I think it's good and important to talk about the different ways to
> navigate (e.g. I'm particularly fond of sexp-navigation), but when
> I present Emacs to my students, I never bother with the cursor-motion
> part.

Note that while describing cursor motion, we also introduce the
important topic of a numeric argument to a command.

> E.g. I talk instead about windows and buffers (e.g. the fact that
> you can display a buffer in more that one window at the same time),
> especially about C-x 1 to get rid of the pesky windows which may popup
> along the way.

Which is the topic of the very next part of the tutorial, after
skimming over a couple of small but important issues.

> I also talk about indentation (since either they can't imagine that the
> editor might do it for them, or on the contrary they're disappointed
> that it doesn't happen 100% automatically, or because they're confusing
> the TAB key, the insertion of TAB characters, and the notion of
> indenting text to a "tabulation point", which they seem to sometimes
> take from WYSIWYG word processors).

That's hardly in the first several topics, not before buffers, files,
undo, insertion and deletion, search, etc.  If it's important enough
to be in the tutorial, we could add that, though.