Re: emacs-oob-reboot

[Damian Chrzanowski <pjdamian.chrzanowski@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 06 May 2017 10:36:12 +0300
Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > Date: Sat, 06 May 2017 07:13:37 +0100
> > From: Damian Chrzanowski <pjdamian.chrzanowski@gmail.com>
> > 
> > There's a lot of talk on reddit already about new improvements
> > "breaking" things, people's configs suffering, key bindings
> > reconfigured, etc.  
> 
> FWIW, we try to minimize such breakage, and have the information about
> getting back the old behavior in NEWS which goes with each new
> release.
> 
> > Therefore, I suggest that on first load emacs should ask the user
> > about key binding preferences :
> > 
> > 1. I have my own .el files, ask me where they are Emacs so that you
> > can import them (from GitHub, zip files, etc.)
> > 2. I want emacs standard keyboard bindings please
> > 3. I want Cua mode so that Emacs behaves like "popular" editors
> > 4. I want Vim-like modal editing key bindings (this option will
> > install evil and a few evil extras, hypothetically). 5. Whatever
> > else is out there???  
> 
> If your key bindings are recorded on init files of any kind that Emacs
> processes during startup, they will be largely unaffected by changes
> in new Emacs versions.  So I'm not sure what problem you are asking to
> solve by this proposal.
> 

Sorry I should have made it more clear in what I meant in this section.
There is a new initiative
https://github.com/josteink/emacs-oob-reboot to revamp Emacs' defaults,
and make it more modern ! One of the proposals (in terms of
attractiveness for new users) is the option to automatically setup
keybindings upon Emacs' first run. All I am trying to say is that I
believe that this functionality would most certainly attract a new
user, as most users (like myself at the beginning) were terrified of
Ctrl + ... for navigation. It would be a nice and thoughtful touch and
I am nearly certain that it could draw users of other editors to start
using Emacs. The more users we have the better the software potentially
can become.

> > Let's not fool ourselves, editor wars are silly and childish. What
> > we want to do is create a more attractive and mature environment
> > and I believe that this will represent a more open approach. This
> > approach will also show, at the very beginning, just how flexible
> > Emacs is and that it can be modified to any preferences.
> > 
> > I am of a strong opinion that a lot of folks would simply put Emacs
> > away based on the fact that they felt forced to use Ctrl +... to
> > move around. Well... Let's move on and show that Emacs is much more
> > than that!  
> 
> That's okay, and that's why Emacs provides customization features.
> You should be able to customize your keybindings once, and have those
> customizations be in effect for many Emacs versions.

Yes I agree, although I suggest a better out of the box experience for
future Emacs releases.