Re: Making Emacs more friendly to newcomers

[Po Lu]

Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> writes:

> Please keep in mind that if we hope to make Emacs reach, say, 30%
> share among programmers, the extra 25% would be new users.

We should prioritize existing users over hypothetical users that don't
even exist yet.

> So for all questions about changing defaults, we should ask ourselves,
> do we prioritize the existing 5% (or 3%, as SO poll says) userbase
> that will naturally continue shrinking over the years, or whether we
> prefer to make life easier and more productive for the users that
> should come later.

One exists.  The other doesn't.
Which one would you choose?

> And it's not like existing, long-time users can't grow to like the new
> defaults (even after a certain amount of grumbling). I think the Xref 
> example shows that.

Xref was bad enough.  Changing C-a to "select all" would be worse.