Re: Emacs for new users

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 5:41 PM, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
>> For beginners I think it would be good if when minibuffer is active
>> clicking in other windows did not work. Or moving to another window in
>> any other way.
>
> Hi Lennart,
>
> Why? What possible reason could you have for such a suggestion?
>
> That would totally prevent using the mouse to interact with other buffers during
> minibuffer input. You wouldn't even be able to choose a completion from
> *Completions* using the mouse.


Sorry, you are right. I did not think of that kind of use.

What I meant was that they should not be allowed to leave the
minibuffer and go to another window. This is similar to how many GUI
programs work.

In some cases there are clever uses of other windows, for example the
one you mentioned. Such use should of course be allowed. (It is more
difficult to make that kind of use easy in Emacs since we can't for
example mark visually which window to interact with and which to not.
This is otherwise what many GUI applications do.)


> Sheesh. For the most part, these are simply reports of how people learn Emacs.
> They are interesting, and we can learn from them, but they are not necessarily
> alarms or calls to action.


They are useful.