Re: evangelizing Emacs with a graphical tutorial

[Jason Spiro]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:
> Jason Spiro <address@hidden> writes:
>> "Drew Adams" <address@hidden> wrote:
...
>> http://stuff.mit.edu/iap/emacs/emacs-slides-1.pdf seems to be a good
>> one.  It quickly covers the basics such as how to move the cursor.
>> Then it gets to the useful stuff, such as the kill ring, isearch, etc.
...
> Is that a trick question?  How about an interactive hands-on tutorial
> running in Emacs itself?  Seems more useful for me, and we have that
> already. And it is not in a propretary format, and it does not
> require a different program for display.

The tutorial I mention covers far more than the built-in tutorial,
including major modes, regexp replace, and more.  It is attractively
presented in concise point form with useful diagrams.  Having seen it,
what do you think of it?

> And for non-interactive use, it would appear that the Emacs reference
> card covers a _lot_ more.  Maybe we should link to that in some
> manner, like offering to call
> (shell-command
>   (format (mailcap-mime-info "application/postscript")
>      (expand-file-name "refcard.ps" data-directory)))

I agree that would also be useful to link to.  However, it is not a
wide-ranging tutorial; it is a reference, useful mainly for
experienced Emacs users.  IMO, Emacs needs to ship with more graphical
and tutorial-style material.

>> If I submit a patch to implement this link, will it be accepted?
>
> Apart from the points above: what guarantee would we have that the
> link does not go away in the next 5 years?

None.  Perhaps we can get the tutorial released into the public domain
so we can ship it with Emacs?  Also, is there a way it can be
converted for viewing inside Emacs (perhaps in w3m-el if installed, or
in Emacs itself otherwise?)