Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date)

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@is.elta.co.il>]

> Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2002 17:11:36 +0200
> From: Terje Bless <link@pobox.com>
> 
> >Pressing `C-x b <tab>' gives you a "completions" buffer
> 
> And *poof* you've just thrown me into a new world; "Mommy this is
> _confusing_! My window just split in two and half my text is hidden.

How is this different from a dialog that pops up and obscures part of
the display?

> I don't need all the power of XEmacs, only a
> small subset of it, and becoming an expert to use the small subset is a bad
> tradeoff; too steep a price.

If you refuse to learn, how do you know that you only need a small
subset of the features?  Perhaps if you learned more you'd want to use
more of them?

In general, there should be no need to read the entire Emacs manual,
or even large parts thereof (although this is certainly recommended!).
The manual should be indexed well enough to allow you to find any
important issue within seconds by using the `i' command.  If you
cannot find some issue via `i', I suggest to file a docs bug report.

> Very very few of the things I want to do with XEmacs should require me to
> actually read the manual. They're simple things, why can't they be simple
> to do?

Examples, please!  It is not useful to write slogans to which everyone
agrees without specific examples.  What are those ``simple things''
that cannot be done in a simple way?