Re: Emacs User Friendliness Question/Hope

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Christoph <cschol2112@googlemail.com> writes:
> In order to help increasing the "user-friendliness" couldn't we do
> something similar to what viper-mode does? I.e. provide different levels
> of "Emacs-ness".
>
> The lowest level (default?) could enable features that are common among
> other editors/IDEs, e.g. CUA. Increasing levels could "unlock" more and
> more "Emacs-ness" up to the point of where you get what everybody would
> consider the "true" Emacs in all its glory.

You'd have to be much more specific.

This seems like the sort of idea that's attractive when stated vaguely
with lots of hand-waving, but would be very hard to actually make work
in practice.

What "levels" would there be, exactly?  What bindings would be different
in each level?  How would you avoid conflicts between "traditional"
Emacs bindings and CUA bindings?  How would your scheme work in the
presence of 3rd-party packages?  Would your scheme discourage people
from learning Emacs bindings?

As I mentioned in a previous message on this thread, cua-mode, which has
fairly limited goals, has to use extremely kludgey methods to achieve
them.  Something considerably more elaborate would probably have an even
harder time.

-Miles

-- 
Any man who is a triangle, has thee right, when in Cartesian Space,
to have angles, which when summed, come to know more, nor no less,
than nine score degrees, should he so wish.  [TEMPLE OV THEE LEMUR]