Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de>
> Cc: Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>,  johan.myreen@gmail.com,
>   emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2024 14:21:36 +0100
> 
> Though I think the disagreement hints that there’s something more
> general that’s not as good as it could be: discoverability.

Discoverability doesn't mean the things need to be in my face.  It
means they are easy to discover _when_I_need_them_.  Nothing else will
work well in a package such as Emacs with thousands of features.

In order to be able to discover stuff in Emacs, I need at least to
know what I'm looking for.  I need to know to ask the questions.  If I
know to ask the right questions and use the right words, then the
built-in documentation has several commands which will make
discoverability easy.  (If they don't, please report specific bugs.)
But if I don't even know to ask the questions, I need to try, or to
guess, or to use some clever search engine, or just wait for that TIL
day to come.

> For keybindings, which-key-mode mostly solves that for me.

which-key-mode will not help you discover key bindings of packages you
haven't loaded into your session.  So various optional features that
define useful key bindings will not be discoverable that way.  For
example, if you type "C-c", which-key-mode will not tell you about key
bindings of, say, Outline mode, unless that mode is already activated.

> But I don’t know a way to finding that there’s a feature that could
> help me isn’t better.

Emacs has several Help commands specifically designed to ease
discoverability.  Take a look at the beginning of the Help chapter in
the Emacs user manual, where these facilities are described.