Re: Some developement questions

[hw <hw@adminart.net>]

phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord) writes:

> Personally, I would like to ditch all the "how to move around" with
> keys stuff -- this scares most people to hell, because they think that
> they need to learn this to do something that they already know how to
> do these things.

right

The current tutorial is more suited to drive people away than anything
else.

Who knows what a META or an EDIT key is?  And who cares?  Even after
almost 30 years of getting used to them, I'm finding notations like 'C-x
ret f' or 'M-w' very confusing.  How does that belong into a tutorial?

People might use C-v to copy something rather than to scroll.  They will
use the cursor keys and PgUp and PgDown to move around.

What are the didactic purposes of having added so many blank lines?

Then when you do go ahead and hold down C-v as instructed, you suddenly
find yourself somewhere close to the end of the tutorial.  It only takes
a second for that with 'emacs -q' (and my default of 'xset r rate 250
60').

What is the user supposed to do then?

It's good to explain key bindings, but not like that at the beginning of
a tutorial when 99.9999% of the users do not still use keyboards that
don't have cursor keys.  The ones who do probably have found their ways
of dealing with it.


Your tutorial even explains what Emacs is and gives some history.  That
is a much more welcoming start.

> In terms of advanced issues, my thought was to enable tutorial
> extensions to go into ELPA and then have a navigational structure.

Maybe several tutorials would be better, like one covering what Emacs is
(nowadays that may be a good idea), one covering the first steps and
others covering the installation of packages after users have aquired
some understanding of what packages are.

My first step with 'emacs -q' would be to make the menu fonts larger.
As much as I like monospace fonts, the typewriter font used for the text
was *really ugly* even 30 years ago.  One look at Emacs with this font
might turn most people away before they start reading anything.