Re: Making Emacs more newbie friendly

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Brian Elmegaard <brian@rk-speed-rugby.dk> writes:

> Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:
>
>> a bit.  But please, _describe_ these exotic unknown programs rather than
>> 
> I think I did already. But the users prefer an interface like:
> http://www.winedt.com/HTML/snap.html

Well, then let them use it.  Why should you force Emacs onto them if
they don't want it?

While I think that it might be nice if Emacs would abstract interface
elements internally to a degree to make it possible to employ most of
the standard widgetry available nowadays, this is going to be a slow
process at best, and it has to be done carefully in order not to tie
oneself too closely to the technology du jour: Emacs' life span has
been _much_ longer than that of its host systems.

> In addition I would like to be able to something like
> http://eclipse.org/articles/Article-GEF-editor/gef-schema-editor.html
> inside emacs.

That looks so much like a graphical application that it appears
completely pointless to have it "in Emacs".  Tighter integration with
the graphic creating software might be desirable, like being able to
use Emacs for editing text widgets, but the application itself is
probably better left apart from Emacs.

preview-latex <URL:http://preview-latex.sourceforge.net> will provide
graphical elements in a more or less accessible way, but you still
edit the source code, not the elements themselves.  And Emacs is,
after all, a source code editor.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum