Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 5 Oct 2024 at 05:41, Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide <arne_bab@web.de> wrote:
>
> Hi Eduardo,
>
> Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Yes! To be honest Anonymous's proposal doesn't make much sense to
> > me... for example, this,
> >
> >> Without the user having to know about init file, packages, archives,
> >> functions, variables, hooks, and endless init file debugging, or even
> >> to write a single line of elisp.
> >>
> >> Users can be from different backgrounds not necessary hackers or
> >> developers.
> >
> > that gives me the impression that Anynymous thinks that people should
> > configure their Emacs first and learn "the rest" later, and that that
> > would work very well.
>
> I think they have a point with that. The success of Doom¹ and Spacemacs²
> (to my impression many of the new Emacs users in the past decade came
> from these) suggests that many users need something that just solves
> their current requirements.
>
> Besides having pretty readable online-documentation (with Doom simply
> using what github provides), they mostly provide “what is your task? I
> will make it work well and look good.”³
>
> ¹ https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs
> ² https://www.spacemacs.org/
> ³ https://www.spacemacs.org/layers/LAYERS.html#programming-and-markup-languages
>
> But even these are still far too much for casual users — even casual
> programmers. Configuring anything before being able to start is often
> too much. The JetBrains (IntelliJ) page shows what
>
> And most current tools are available as curl-bash (curl script from
> maybe trusted source and execute it without inspection).
>
> A writer friend of mine (also build system engineer) spent months
> collecting neat adjustments to create the perfect writing environment.
> That worked, because org already provides much out of the box.
>
> So some way of making custom emacs setups provide the UX of installing a
> regular application might actually bring more users.
>
> I’m not sure whether that’s actually the best approach for Emacs, but
> something to reduce the friction of getting an emacs setup optimized to
> a given task to almost zero would likely be a valuable improvement.
>
> > understand... and at that point we can plonk them, but we will have
> > the code for (1), (2), (3), and (4), and that can be useful in the
> > future...
> >
> >   (Slightly bitter) cheers,
> >     Eduardo
>
> Please try to keep bitterness off list. I understand the sentiment, but
> the times I gave in to bittereness or cynicism myself, it always hit the
> wrong people, scaring active new contributors away from the project
> (whom I later saw contributing constructively to other projects).


Hi Arne,

you are right - I've tried to learn Doom Emacs to help a friend who
used it and my experience with it was so bad that I tend to forget
that lots of people love it...

To make a long story too short, my friend was trying to use Doom
Emacs, and he was learning a kind of Lisp that was only a
configuration language - only after several months I discovered that
he had plans to learn things like defun and setq someday, but "next
year".

The idea of adding a button for beginners at the startup page and
making it go to an Org page looks like a much better approach to me in
comparison with Doom - and I imagine that it would let people
configure Emacs in a wide spectrum of configurations that would go
from Vanilla to some maximalist configurations with almost as many
packages as Doom, and the Lisp code for that could be much easier to
understand that the Lisp of the Doom configs... but we would need to
start small, and in the process we (or rather: I) would have the
opportunity to understand why lots of people find it exciting to spend
six months playing with configurations, but think that understanding
what defuns and setqs do is something incredibly painful, to be
postponed as most as possible...

Btw, I am the author of this,

  http://anggtwu.net/eev-intros/find-eev-quick-intro.html#2
  http://anggtwu.net/eev-intros/find-windows-beginner-intro.html

that is for beginners and that starts by Lisp. But I need to leave now
- more later.

  Cheers,
    Eduardo