Re: VC menu ?

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

> On Jul 6, 2017, at 23:01, Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 06 Jul 2017 07:27:12 -0400 Mark Oteiza <mvoteiza@udel.edu> wrote: 
> 
> MO> Sarcasm aside, if you had ever flipped through the Emacs manual or
> MO> scrolled through a list of keybindings, you would have been aware of VC.
> 
> I think menu-driven UI discovery is fun and an essential part of the GUI
> experience. We should not expect users to be diligent readers[1].

Indeed. My original question was a git question and John replied with a vc answer, which was of course the best possible answer but I had git in mind and would not have thought of checking for vc features (especially since it has been repeated here that native git support in emacs was not complete, or something like that).

So it is not really an issue that features are discoverable or not, or documented or not, it is about knowing what you are looking for in the first place. If the VC menu had been right there, I would have probably tested "Compare with base version" or "Show other version" and would have *discovered* that feature, and then would have I checked the manual to see what it actually does and what the other vc functions do, but only after seeing that VC functions work good enough for git issues.

Jean-Christophe 

> Ted
> 
> [1] as previously posted:
> 
> Rule #1 of writing manuals: They Won't Read It. 

No, it's "They don't know where to start, and it's 643 pages, so it's always for when one has the time, which is not often."