jargon translation up-front in doc (was: Menu suggestion)

[Drew Adams]

Apologies if the latest tutorial & Emacs manual already take care of this.

Proposal - Add a *brief* jargon translation near the beginning of the
tutorial and the Emacs manual, such as that at
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsNewbie, "Fundamental Concepts" >
"Emacs-Speak (Jargon)".

The 5-line table there can help newbies digest the systematic presentations
of Emacs concepts that follow in the manual:

Common Term          Emacs Term
-----------          ----------
selection            region
cut                  kill
paste                yank
window               frame
shortcut             key sequence

The two columns don't present exact synonyms, but that can be detailed at
the appropriate places. This would at least give new users a head start in
understanding the doc (and doc strings).

 - Drew



-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden
[mailto:address@hidden Behalf Of
Eli Zaretskii
Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 3:36 AM
To: Kim F. Storm
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Menu suggestion


> From: address@hidden (Kim F. Storm)
> Date: 26 Apr 2004 11:56:24 +0200
>
> When a new user is trying emacs for the first time, I bet that he
> already knows about scrolling using arrow keys, home/end, pgup/pgdn,

IIRC, once upon a time, I suggested to say in the tutorial, right at
its beginning, that if the reader already knows how to move around,
she could skip the first N sections.  (We could even make those parts
disappear, i.e. not be displayed, if the user doesn't want to read
them.)  I think Richard agreed, but requested that this be accompanied
by an advice to read those sections anyway, since they teach Emacs
bindings for cursor motion commands, which in our opinion are handier
for fast typists than the arrow keys and their ilk.

Given that some of the more boring sections of the tutorial are
skipped, we could add to it a few new sections describing features
that users generally want but cannot find and/or figure out easily.

Unfortunately, I never had time to rework the tutorial along these
lines.  Perhaps someone would consider doing that now.

Alternatively, some kind of ``guided tour'' thru Emacs for beginners
(which could use the tutorial as the starting point), would IMHO be a
very useful addition to Emacs.  Such a document could overcome the
greatest disadvantage of the tutorial: that it's a linear document
that is quite large, so it's inconvenient to read it in parts.


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