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Re: Yet another discussion on improving the first time user experience


From: Andreas Röhler
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion on improving the first time user experience
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 16:23:13 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8

Am 23.09.2013 16:04, schrieb Pascal J. Bourguignon:
Andreas Röhler <address@hidden> writes:

Am 23.09.2013 09:07, schrieb Eli Zaretskii:
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 08:03:30 +0200
From: Andreas Röhler <address@hidden>

Am 23.09.2013 02:18, schrieb Lennart Borgman:
The tutorial kind of throws other keybindings than the arrow keys on the
new user. Kind of patronizing if someone asks me. ;-)

Putting users first attention at that kind of matter, it also spreads a quit 
unjust and wrong impression WRT Emacs and it's people.

That tutorial probably was okay twenty years ago.
No it reads as vim's ":q" is envied, proving emacs can make it difficult too.

When did you read it last time? also 20 years ago?



At the very first screen C-v is presented.
Nowadays keyboards commonly have an own key for it, no need to bother beginners 
with this.
While later, certainly, it's preferable.

Next screen tells about C-p, C-n
That must have been changed very recently ;)

Perhaps.  On the other hand, I use C-v M-v C-p and C-n much much more
often than the arrows and pgup/down keys, just for the 10 cm out (+ 10
cm back) I would have to move my hand to use them.

I only use arrows when I don't have my hands on the keyboards in the
first place, and even, to scroll down SPC is in a lot of mode much more
convenient too.

Perfectly right. But, we definitely aren't talking WRT experienced Emacs users,
the tutorial is about beginners at the very first day on earth.



What I mean is that perhaps concentrating on keys is the wrong thing to
do, vs. concentrating on bindings and the fact that you can configure
them as you want, and that the default bindings (foremost the oldest of
them) are quite _optimized_.



So this thread seems taking the route.

A tutorial should start to tell what Emacs is about.
Basic edits are so common nowadays, any extra here might come later.

Let's the menu display all basic commands and keys and refer the beginner to 
menu.
But tell why we are using Emacs and not any other tool.



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