Re: Efforts to attract more users?

["Andreas Röhler" <andreas.roehler@online.de>]

Am 02.08.2010 22:15, schrieb Stefan Monnier:
>>>> I'm not sure if Emacs is attracting new users the way it used to be.
>>>> Certainly search volume has been going downhill for more than several years
>>>> (http://www.google.com/trends?q=emacs),
>>>>          
>>> What are the units in the vertical direction?
>>>        
>> 1.0 is the mean of the period
>>      
> So units are a ratio w.r.t all the searches.  Is there a way to know the
> actual number of searches to which this corresponds?  This way we could
> tell whether the number of searches is also going down (since it might
> still be going up if the ratio is going down slower than the total
> number of searches increases).
>
>
>          Stefan
>
>
>    

Hi Stefan,

with respect to attracting new users, Emacs could
do better right at the entrance:

Emacs tutorial starts explaining

  NOTICE: The main purpose of the Emacs tutorial is to teach you
  the most important standard Emacs commands (key bindings).

and proceeds that way walking the desert.

My suggestion: leave the keys aside at the very beginning,
tell user what Emacs is and why it should be used.

The WHY for me is its extensibility. Instead of keys,
I'd show with the first lines, how a function like "Go
to the end" is easily changed:

(defun stop-always-two-lines-before-end ()
   "This function will put the cursor at the second line from bottom up. "
   (interactive)
   (end-of-buffer)
   (forward-line -2))

BTW a missing function `backward-line' points to another
issue, Emacs may enhance in order to attract new users.

Thanks a lot for all your efforts

Andreas

--
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