Re: Some developement questions

[hw <hw@adminart.net>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ 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. ]]]
>
>   > Yeah. Most of that stuff is "move cursor back and forward". It's too
>   > slow for most new users and freaks them out. While it was well intended
>   > at the time, I think, it is now a negative feature of the tutorial.
>
> Users need to learn these commands in order to edit _efficiently_ with
> Emacs.

Why can they not edit efficiently with Emacs without learning the
movement keys described in the tutorial?

Keyboards have changed over the years, and using some of these movement
keys would make editing very inefficient because they are rather
difficult to press on nowadays` keyboards.  The effect of having to
re-learn, which may diminish the efficiency of editing, is also
something to consider.

There is much more to learn about Emacs than key bindings for cursor
movement, and the movement keys in the tutorial may be amongst the least
relevant things that help efficient editing.  An email and a C source
require different things to make their editing more efficient, hence
Emacs has a C-mode and a Message-mode one might need to learn about,
each with their own key bindings.

> But maybe most beginners will not aim to edit _efficiently_
> and it is ok not to teach them this.

With very few exceptions, people always do what they want without
worrying about efficiency.

A beginner learning about Emacs striving for the best efficiency of
editing could easily be the most unlikely case --- and/or figure that
using the cursor keys is more efficient than using key combinations that
are difficult to press and hard to remember.

>   > I would like to add automation which would work better. So where it says
>   > "create a new frame", it would be nice to have a click button which
>   > actually does this for you.
>
> I don't follow.  Concretely, what do you propose, and what is good about it?

I haven't read it all yet.  It starts with telling the reader what Emacs
is and gives some history, and that seems to be a good starting point.

It might make sense to have many tutorials for different topics, like
"what are key bindings", "important key bindings", "movement keys
specific to Emacs", "what are modes", "how to edit XXX efficiently" ...