From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.io!.POSTED.ciao.gmane.io!not-for-mail From: Richard Stallman Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: "Why is emacs so square?" Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2020 23:20:53 -0400 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: rms@gnu.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=Utf-8 Injection-Info: ciao.gmane.io; posting-host="ciao.gmane.io:159.69.161.202"; logging-data="11551"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@ciao.gmane.io" Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org, ndame@protonmail.com To: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=EC=A1=B0=EC=84=B1=EB=B9=88?= Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Sun Apr 26 05:21:28 2020 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([209.51.188.17]) by ciao.gmane.io with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.92) (envelope-from ) id 1jSXrE-0002tX-Db for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org; Sun, 26 Apr 2020 05:21:28 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:51072 helo=lists1p.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1jSXrD-0004eq-EO for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane-mx.org; Sat, 25 Apr 2020 23:21:27 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::10]:37424) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1jSXqh-00041f-U9 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 25 Apr 2020 23:20:56 -0400 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::e]:37367) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1jSXqh-0005De-Lw; Sat, 25 Apr 2020 23:20:55 -0400 Original-Received: from rms by fencepost.gnu.org with local (Exim 4.82) (envelope-from ) id 1jSXqf-0001AN-2V; Sat, 25 Apr 2020 23:20:53 -0400 In-Reply-To: (message from =?iso-8859-1?Q?=EC=A1=B0=EC=84=B1=EB=B9=88?= on Sat, 25 Apr 2020 02:57:17 +0900) X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.23 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: "Emacs-devel" Xref: news.gmane.io gmane.emacs.devel:247813 Archived-At: [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > > If the cursor keys work out of the box then the tutorial should > > begin with features which can be used without learning new cursor keys, > > demonstrating something which emacs does well or better than other > > tools. I used to think it was important to teach Emacs cursor motion character because they are needed to edit efficiently. But if that is a big discouragement to using the tutorial, let's try it another way. > Org mode, magit, helm comes to my mind. "Org mode", as currently conceptualized (a single thing), is not suitable to teach to beginners. If we reconceptualize it as several task-specific features, some of them may be useful to teach to beginners. Magit is not part of Emacs. I would like to include it in Emacs. A year ago, its developer agreed to cooperate with getting the copyright assignments; but last January, after I found a volunteer to do the work of arranging this with contributors, the developer did not respond. Has anyone been in touch with him since then? It would be very good to get this moving. I don't know what Helm's situation is (or what it does), but whether describing it in Emacs is an option to consider depends on that situation. As a general matter, it is a lot more work to describe something with a learn-by-doing tutorial than to describe it in a manual. The number of topics we can teach in the tutorial is thus limited. The existing tutorial does not talk about _any_ special purpose subsystems, not even Dired, and I think it how it should be. I think that people who reach the stage of starting using Dired already know enough that they don't need a learn-by-doing tutorial to learn it, and they might on the contrary find it annoyingly slow as a way to learn. That must go double for Magit. The best way to tell people how to use features like that is with ordinary manuals. -- Dr Richard Stallman Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)