Emacs for new users

["Per Starbäck" <per@starback.se>]

I wrote:
> But I prefer if they don't have to, since they have lots of other stuff to learn as
> well. Every good step is a good step, even the small ones.

I should add that I love all the care that has been taken in making
Emacs 23 even more accessible for new users
than Emacs 22 was. I'm teaching an intro course where we use Emacs
among other things, and I think if was a big
change to do this with Emacs 23 this year. Kudos to all involved!

Maybe I should ask my students about what they have found particularly
confusing. Some things I've noticed
off the top of my head:

* beeping is often disturbing and unexpected, in particular for
scrolling past the beginning or end of the
  buffer with the scroll wheel. (I agree. That's hardly an error.)
* the frame/window terminology (of course)
* I have a hard time getting them to use *one* emacs instead of
starting several when they are editing several files.
  One reason is they want them in different frames. Probably
find-file-other-frame should be in the menus.
* "M-" (for a short while)
* They are interrupting things by doing stuff with the mouse. Like
clicking somewhere in the middle of a query-replace.

I want Emacs to be seen as the best choice for anyone wanting to use
an editor, not just knowledgeable hackers.
I would have loved it if the effort in writing gedit had been spent in
improving Emacs for new users instead for
example, so that Emacs would be the default Gnome editor, and it
disturbs me that many GNU/Linux distributions
don't include Emacs by default. I think most agree with me in this,
but that some instead see Emacs as "not for
everyone"?