On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 10:05 AM, Le Wang wrote: > On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 11:46 AM, Rustom Mody > wrote: > > The most customizable editor and arguments and fights about an easily > > settable default? > > Ironic... > > You are proposing a new flame-war where grumpy old men complain that > they have to now add a "emacscality" setting to their init file, and > therefore Free software will lose and "M$", "MS", "Word", "Apple" > will win! > No No not my intention! Ive too much invested into emacs to see it go down the tube. > > The striking thing to me about this whole "debate" - and I stress the > quotes - is that there is a distinct class of Emacs users, who having > climbed the steep learning curve to "master" Emacs are very interested > in keeping the barrier to entry high. Presumably, they do this to > keep themselves feeling special that they've acquired the Emacs skill. > > Please Le Lets not return flames with flames. > They don't even bother to craft arguments for their position on UI > design basis; of which there are few, including Alan Mackenzie's in > the link you posted. All they do is try to appeal to our love of Free > software by trotting out strawmen like "Word", "MS" (or more absurdly > "M$"), and "Apple". > > This is a user interface issue. Yes, rms question was a UI question. Many of the responses suggested that although the details of this question dont bother them much there are larger questions at stake of which this is a secondary/tertiary 'corollary'. Would it not be better to deal with those? > Why can't we just present arguments > as such? I've layed out a specific use-case where this change will > surely help new users. Yes, NEW USERS. They should be the focus. > Not people who already know how to customize their Emacs. > > Yes and no Yes: We should focus on new users No: for the 'only' Lets remember that emacs started out as being unbelievably inclusive [I remember 20 years ago when an emacs guru showed me that he could make emacs into wordstar] So lets start by trying to include free and commercial OSes, old and noob users and back of from this position only when it is seen to be too utopian