Re: line-move-visual

[Evans Winner <thorne@unm.edu>]

In my opinion, the question should never be what new users
of Emacs want.  What new users want is an editor that is 5%
better than notepad.exe because that is per-force the limit
of their imagination.  They generally do no know 1% of what
Emacs can do, so are not in a position to intelligently
decide what the defaults should be.  They /should/ want to
rely on experienced users for that, and they should be
willing to spend the extra tiny bit of effort up-front to
learn the reasoning behind it.  If they aren't, then Emacs
isn't for them.  Let them go.  Changing defaults to whatever
makes the least friction for those who switch to Emacs is
not a service to new users; the principle is that people
tend to stick with what they learn first, so dumbed-down
defaults produces dumbed-down users, who will, after a few
months or years, show up on emacs-devel demanding even more
dumbed-down defaults, because that would make it even easier
for the next generation of Microsoft/IBM/CUA refugees.

It sometimes surprises me to find that even some experienced
users of Emacs don't use and even sometimes don't know how
to use keyboard macros.  The name Emacs does, after all,
come from the phrase "Editor MACroS."  It is a fundamental
part of the user experience.  The question with regards to
new users and line-move-visual is whether the slight savings
in initial cognitive friction comes and the price of making
it more difficult for new users to learn to create and use
typical line-at-a-time-type keyboard macros.  I don't claim
to know the answer to this particular question, but I think
the principle above is the right one to consider in this
kind of case.