Re: Upcoming merge of adaptive-wrap

[Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>]

On 27/01/2024 05:58, Po Lu wrote:
> Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:
> 
>> But would they, largely? You actually have to visit the directory
>> which hosts NEWS on your system (where is it installed to?), mark all
>> previous NEWS files and do the search. That's non-trivial.
> 
> Is this meant to imply that selecting "Help -> Emacs News", then typing
> `C-x d' is non-trivial?  What about reading the manual, or any other of
> Emacs's built-in facilities for assisting users?

It's an order of a magnitude more involved than 'M-x list-packages' 
followed by C-s.

> When users are stumped, their first reactions are to reach for the
> documentation, be that the manual, apropos or NEWS.

Through Google -- maybe.

> It also stands to reason that users outside the first two categories are
> more inclined to take to a search engine, and to them this thread will
> be more enlightening than the package menu ever will.

Because its title is a good match for whatever the user would search 
for? What would they search for, BTW?

>> If you sit every user behind a screen and force them to read either of
>> the texts entirely, sure. But that's not how it usually works.
> 
> [...]
> 
>> It's a good explanation (easier to understand than the summary, I
>> agree), but I'm curious what would you improve in the summary to make
>> it more recognizable. Any particular keywords? From where I'm
>> standing, even after reading the description, all the important ones
>> seem to be there: "wrap", "adaptive", "line-wrapping", "wrap-prefix".
> 
> I never proposed to improve the summary, since in my opinion, the
> current package description is already the optimum under the limitations
> of its format.

You renamed the package to visual-wrap, so perhaps the term "visual" 
could help (instead of "smart"?).

There's also a mistake in the description now: visual-fill-mode does not 
exist.

>> Even if you're reading the NEWS, you probably don't carefully scan
>> every entry, so there must be some particular words which might have
>> piqued your interest in the way that the current summary does not.
> 
> The mental effort required to understand the NEWS and the documentation
> I installed is so little that, truly, the only words left to be said are
> "there are none so blind as those who will not see", assuming that the
> reader is searching for this feature.

The issue is not reading a particular NEWS entry, but finding it.