Re: How to make Emacs popular again.

[Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>]

* Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> [2020-09-27 05:43]:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
>   > > Users who need to actually do something useful with their time, not
>   > > just follow hyperlinks, will very quickly lose patience and stop
>   > > following.
> 
>   > I just have a feeling you got that opinion too subjectively. In my
>   > opinion, every word should be reachable, so that user can understand
>   > everything,
> 
> When you say "reachable", could you explain concretely?
> Reachable "where"?  Where would the code find the text to
> refer to?  That question is crucial for both practical
> and ethica; questions.

You are right, I have not expressed myself well.

Consider two extremes: reading some alien language which one does not
know, certainly belongs to extreme misunderstanding area. Reading
simple English belongs to extreme understanding area.

In any computing, people are asking questions. If they are alone, they
may go through larval stage until they understand all the terms. This
is because of tedious work to find proper definitions for words.

Thus when I said that every word should be reachable, in my opinion
every special term should be defined in the glossary. This is for the
sake of bringing understanding to users. This is something that should
be internal to Emacs. Modifier plus mouse or some key could bring jump
to definition of the word in glossary. This feature is not so
complex. It should include looking up words from within Info files as
well, and if such definition does not exit, there should be fallback
to some external dictionaries.

And for just any word, including those words in the menu, anywhere,
there should be possibility to define or search for such words,
including in any other languages. That is my general opinion, I am
using wordnut package and I can quickly define any word at point, if I
click enter on any word within the definition of Wordnet dictionary, I
am going to the other definition, this way I can clarify any
misunderstood words. This feature could be external to Emacs, as it is
much more complex. There are many packages using various dictionaries,
such could be put in a group.

Emacs should in general have an option under Tools -> Look up word, as
we deal with words, and dictionary feature should be internal to
Emacs, and not just external package.