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


From: Kai Großjohann
Subject: Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date)
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 15:34:36 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.090006 (Oort Gnus v0.06) Emacs/21.2.50 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> Be that as it may, Eli is clearly arguing that the benefits to
> learning more about Emacs IHHO greatly outweigh the barriers, enough
> so that he's willing to contest Terje's (thought-out) opinion.
> Furthermore, Eli implies that the cost of reducing the barriers is
> quite high (elsewhere in the thread).

There might be some misunderstandings here.  My reading of the whole
thing:

Terje: I just want to use a few Emacs features.  I don't want to
become an Emacs expert just to use these few features.

Eli: It's worth it to learn more Emacs features.

It appears that one is not an answer to the other.  Also, these two
statements don't contradict each other.  It should be very simple in
Emacs to do simple things, such as opening a file and moving the
cursor and inserting some characters and saving the file.

If something "simple" is not simple to do, that's a bug and should be
fixed.  For example, I believe that completion is a really great
thing but that file selector boxes would be helpful for the casual
user, so they should be added in Emacs¹; requiring casual users to
learn about the minibuffer prompt and TAB is not a good idea, IMVHO.

Of course, the challenge is to get a file selector box which allows
all the nifty completion things, too.  As that might be difficult,
one could offer traditional C-x C-f behavior in addition to the file
selector box.

kai

¹ I use "Emacs" to mean both flavors in the whole message, except
  here.  File selector boxes are already present in XEmacs.
-- 
Silence is foo!



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