Re: VC menu ?

[Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@gmail.com>]

> On Jul 8, 2017, at 16:04, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> I'm actually unconvinced VC warrants its own top-level menu item.
> AFAIR, it's in "Tools" in every IDE I ever saw, so Emacs is not the
> odd one out here.

I don't write prose in other IDEs, I don't do most of the things I do in other IDEs, or simple text editors for that matter. Besides, most "writing environment" don't have strong version control commands at all and you have to use the external commands to access them (macOS provides very simple vc on a file basis where you can choose to "go back in time", but that works only with some applications).

In the Magit thread you just hinted how vc commands were important. I don't think I'll ever need Magit for anything I need to do here (and I found John Wiegley's bottom-up introduction to be the best thing I ever read about git) and having a visual reminder of things I can do readily available is very important to me as a non-expert user of git/vcs/emacs, etc.

>  Also, why should that be more important than, say,
> "Compile" or "Shell command" or "Compare"?

"Compile" is a single command.
"Shell command" too is a single command.
There are no top menu slots for single commands at the moment, so they don't compare.

I can't say anything about "Compare".

>  That this particular
> community is a heavy user of some VCS doesn't yet mean we should skew
> Emacs to our specific needs, especially since most of us hardly ever
> use the menus anyway.

I think you may be missing the point. Version controlling is not something that is useful only to (expert) code writers. It is useful to (and really should be used for) any kind of writing, and visual aids are especially useful to beginners and non-(or casual) code writer.

For me, the VC menu would rather compare to the Buffer menu. It is equally useful because they are both visual aids for concepts that the beginner is not familiar with and after a while they can be ignored when the user has practiced the commands enough.

I guess it is just a configuration away to move VC around, but I'd rather have it at the top by default (and move it some place else later eventually, when I know how to configure the thing, ie. when I've become an "expert").

Now, if you tell me how to move VC to the top, I'll do that for my machine and will stop arguing :)

Jean-Christophe