Re: My emacs was upgraded and I am a novice again

[Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com>]

>>>>> "Eli" == Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

Tom> On the minus side, discoverability remains a problem.  Sometimes I
Tom> wish I'd found those features years earlier.

>> Ideas for an 'index' please? What form? Its the match of 'idea/usage'
>> vs package name/variable/mode. Generally once you have the key words,
>> emacs is sufficiently helpful?

Eli> Instead of inventing new machinery, how about enhancing the existing
Eli> one?  "C-h P" is supposed to use the index you seem to think about.

FWIW I think Emacs has excellent documentation.

The fundamental discoverability problem with Emacs isn't that the
documentation is missing -- it never is.  The problem is, if you want
to find something by keyword, first you must guess the keyword that
the original author used.

I don't know a good way to solve this problem.  Usually if I'm
motivated to look for something I end up doing many searches --
apropos, multiple keyword searches through various info documents, the
Emacs Wiki, and Google.  Even then I sometimes won't find something.

This is hard enough that my need has to be pretty severe -- or have
triggered my curiosity -- to bother.  Otherwise it is usually simpler
to muddling through with whatever (usually less efficient) approach
I've been using.

Tom