Re: Intermediate tutorial shipped with Emacs

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2015-09-19, at 09:22, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

>> From: Spencer Baugh <sbaugh@catern.com>
>> Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2015 22:19:41 -0400
>> 
>> As an example, consider narrowing. If a user didn't already know
>> narrowing existed, they probably wouldn't even bother searching for the
>> feature; it isn't obvious how useful until you know about it. A user
>> without knowledge of narrowing would use other hacks.
>
> A very good example.  Narrowing is described in the manual in a
> 58-line section.  How would you go about giving the user a "taste of"
> narrowing, without essentially telling the same story in slightly
> different words?  It's not trivial (but not impossible, either).

My 2 cents:

* I like the idea of having "batteries included", and the tutorial being
  part of Emacs.  However, aren't e.g. Sacha Chua's Emacs chats better
  for that purpose, where a human being explains his particular
  use-case?

* Also, along these lines: maybe such tutorials should be centered
  around "scenarios", and not features?  Like, take a "scenario" called
  "C editing".  Then you can mention narrowing, compilation mode, maybe
  rgrep and a few other things.  Or, take a scenario "HTML editing".
  Then you can have SGML mode, TRAMP, maybe Org-mode and exporting, etc.
  Also, in such tutorials it would make sense to mention ELPA packages
  (and possibly MELPA, too).

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University