Re: Intermediate tutorial shipped with Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Spencer Baugh <sbaugh@catern.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2015 12:13:25 -0400
> 
> Still, I think it is important that new users be able to quickly get a
> broad sense of the categories of features available in Emacs. Perhaps a
> node that links to all these tutorials, and describes the subject area
> of each of them in a paragraph or two of text?

I think this is impractical.  Emacs has so many different categories
of features in so many completely unrelated fields of application,
that it'd be a challenge to organize such a list in any way that
allows a user to quickly find the categories she might be interested
in.  Keep in mind that just explaining what is included in a category
might take a non-trivial amount of text.

> That is kind of like the Emacs manual's top node

Exactly!  So we already have that material in place.

> but perhaps more helpful for discovering new features, since it
> could be more descriptive than the single-line summaries, and also
> have less material to search through by virtue of grouping some
> features together.

Beware: "more descriptive" might also mean "too long".
Discoverability is hampered by having to wade through too long
descriptions of the stuff to be discovered.

For those reasons, I suggest a bottom-up approach: first let's have a
few of such tutorials, and then let's think how to help users discover
them.  As long as the number of tutorials is small, just their list is
good enough, IMO.  So we can postpone a more serious "guide to
tutorials" when we have enough of them to necessitate such a guide.