Re: Making Emacs more newbie friendly

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

PT <mailshield.gg@mailnull.com> writes:

> On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 19:15:28 +0100, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> My enthusiasm has vanished, BTW. This all thread was just a
>>> sudden, half-baked idea. Reading all the answers I have a more
>>> thorough understanding of the situation. The development resources
>>> available for Emacs are scarce and the idea has no obvious
>>> benefits,
>>
>> It would be less exasperating conversing with you if you did not
>> constantly insinuate stuff and put words into one's mouth.  Nobody
>> said that improving Emacs' appeal to newbies has no obvious
>> benefits.
>
> It was my own conclusion after reading the answers. I don't see the
> benefits anymore.

The benefits to details of your original proposal, maybe.  But that
does not make the ongoing efforts of contributors go away.  That Emacs
has a toolbar and a menubar and tooltips and popup messages telling
about keybindings for complex commands and draggable mode lines and
configurable frame layout and support for mice in a variety of ways
and an interactive help system and tutorials in several languages and
help sheets and whatever and that menus and keybindings are constantly
improved and fought over among the developers (which rarely use the
menus at all) all counts for nothing in your eyes.

The only thing that would count are your ideas, and you are
disappointed because people don't say that just following your lead
will cause paradise.

Userfriendliness is a hard and long process, and throwing around a few
halb-baked buzzphrases is not a major step forward in that regard.

That does not mean that the goal in itself is not worthwhile, but it
takes more than a quick stroke of presumed genius to put it into
motion.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum