From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Xah Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: problem with emacs wiki (was: What alternatives are there to learn Emacs?...) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:13:50 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <17c9e6d6-4b78-49ae-b95e-053037b05ef3@a9g2000prl.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1213141289 27303 80.91.229.12 (10 Jun 2008 23:41:29 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:41:29 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Wed Jun 11 01:42:11 2008 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1K6DTc-0000S4-EG for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:42:08 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:39484 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1K6DSp-00021C-3q for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:41:19 -0400 Original-Path: news.stanford.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews.google.com!w1g2000prd.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 112 Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 69.226.234.243 Original-X-Trace: posting.google.com 1213139631 10762 127.0.0.1 (10 Jun 2008 23:13:51 GMT) Original-X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Original-NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:13:51 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: w1g2000prd.googlegroups.com; posting-host=69.226.234.243; posting-account=bRPKjQoAAACxZsR8_VPXCX27T2YcsyMA User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10_4_11; en) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Safari/525.18, gzip(gfe), gzip(gfe) Original-Xref: news.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:159344 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:54699 Archived-At: Some personal experineces on emacs tutorial... i started to use emacs in 1998. Was a full time user and beta tester for BBEdit for several years before that. The first tutorial i read is the bundled tutorial (C-h t, M-x help- with-tutorial). This tutorial is the way to get you started with emacs from the ground up. It in written in 1980's mindset, gets you started to learn all the emacs ways and terminologies. It is not a practicality oriented one though. Once you've read the bundled tutorial, you'll know about info (C-h i) and how to use its navigation shorcuts, which you can read the whole one-thousand pages of emacs manual. The emacs manual is a bit quaint in today, but it is very well written and complete. It is systematic, topics well organized, jargons are well defined and has several comprehensive index, the writing is clear, is well cross-linked. The technology used for the manual, the texinfo, is a excellent technology at the time. It has hyperlinks preceding its popularity in html by maybe 10 years. (one can think of it as plain-text system with hyperlinks and document hierachy/paging and navigation shortcuts) The writing quality and content of emacs manual, is far better than most OpenSource docs such as perl, python, apache, unix man. This only drawback today, in my opinion, is that its largely written in the 1980s, using terms and jargons that today are not used elsewhere, verbose, and often has sections that discuss systems that are obsolete for 20 years. Sometimes in 1999 i also read =E2=80=9CLearning GNU Emacs=E2=80=9D (O'Reilly= ) by Debra Cameron et al. This book is more practicality oriented (as with most commercial tutorials), and it did gave me a good intro. The book now is out dated though. Last edition, the 2nd ed, published in 1996. Since then, emacs has gone to version 20, 21, and 22. Lots of features are added, and lots of new computing technologies have become important that didn't exist in mid 1990s. The emacs wiki (http://www.emacswiki.org/), started by Alex Schroeder sometimes in 2005 or before, is great. However, i think it could've been better. (1) The wiki software used is Oddmuse, which is a perl script of 4k lines, using flat files as database. As such, it is not comprehensive or powerful. (2) The content, is kinda haphazard. It is somewhat in-between of a encyclopedia-style treatment like Wikipedia and a chaotic online forum. Specifically, when you visit a article, half of article will be dialogues between different users on tips or issues or preferences. I commented to Alex about these problems. I suggest that it should use the same software Wikipedia uses, the MediaWiki. So that, it is far more powerful, with large scale programer support, and the user interface for the wiki will be one that's widely known to millions of users world-wide. (note: Oddmuse is something written by Alex himself, a petlove of sorts) I also suggested that the writing guidlines should follow Wikipedia's style. Specifically, the content editing should be one with the goal of creating a comprehensive, coherent, article that gives readers info or tutorial about the subject. (as opposed to, maintaining the coherence of a dialogue and comments between wiki users) I think there's a lot potential to emacs wiki. It could, for example, develope into a comprehensive elisp library archive (e.g. CPAN). Listing packages by category, wich each package come with a article that discuss its author, purpose, status, caveats, tutorial, similar packages ...etc. And the packages needs not just be modes... but libraries as in most languages. (for example, js2 and nxml modes are both complete parsers for javascript and xml, each of thousands lines of elisp code. They should actually be several libraries, so that these parsers can be widely deployed as language modules for many purposes. Such is largely not done in emacs/elisp community due to emacs being primarily a text-editor with relatively few elisp programers... but is slowing happening anyway (it is something that eventually must happen). A good wiki can be great help in ushering necessary improvements) For the above to take shape, the wiki must adopt a style so that articles aim to be a coherent treatment of the subject (as opposed to dialogue and random tips). (and this is done by crafting the contribution guidelines or rules; examplarily done by Wikipedia) Also, i'd think the wiki's software should adopt MediaWiki, as opposed to one-man's petlove. Xah =E2=88=91 http://xahlee.org/ =E2=98=84 On Jun 10, 2:43 pm, Xah wrote: > On May 11, 5:47 pm, Don Saklad wrote: > > > What alternatives to the usual manuals are there to learn Emacs?... > > especially for new learners who have difficulties with the > > deficiencies in the usual manual texts and jargon. > > > Not all potential new users see themselves as a part of our community! > > you might try my tutorial.http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs.html > > Xah > =E2=88=91http://xahlee.org/ > > =E2=98=84