Re: longtime user of emacs

[Ihor Radchenko]

> I think this solution was proposed by a few people a few months back,
> when this discussion started.  

Could you point me to relevant thread? I lost track of that discussion
at some point.

> It would be nice if people came up with
> an idea as to how exactly this functionality is to be implemented, 
> and a
> set of better usecases than just 'programming' or 'note-taking' or
> 'TRAMP' or 'git'.

As one possibility, we can try to extend "A guided tour to Emacs" and
make it more interactive.

Some thoughts:
1. The link to the tour in the welcome page is not easy to spot for a
new user. There is too much information. I might be better to show it by
default on first startup after installation.
2. Currently, the tour is one long web-page, which is not very easy to
read. I imagine that a presentation-like style (with prev/next buttons
on each page) showing one concept at a time would be easier to read.
3. The tour may as well include interactive customisation. For example,
'Migrating to Emacs' part of the tour may as well contain a clickable
element to turn on CUA mode by default.
4. The tour might ask user questions if the user is going to work with
source code, email, web-browsing, shell, etc. If the user is not
planning to work with certain things, they may as well be hidden from
menu and customisation pages. By hidden I don't mean completely hidden,
but rather "folded" - the user should be able to show them back.
For a newcomer, Emacs offers very too many different options. I believe
that it makes more sense to restrict the customisation and menus to what
user explicitly plans to do. It should be already more than enough to
start learning.
5. Similar guided tours may be created for most popular Emacs features:
   - working with source code
   - org-mode
   - version-control and collaboration
   - remote file access
   - mail
   Those tours might also offer some initial customisation, so that the
   user may disable/enable some features which are not relevant to
   his/her workflow.
   The guides should be easily accessible from menu.
6. Some new users might be confused by default file open dialogie
involving mode-line. I believe that similarly to CUA-mode, Emacs can
emulate more standard approach by offering dired as a way to open files
(not enabled by default, but offered as a customisation together with
CUA-mode).

Best,
Ihor

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I do think that the existing Emacs defaults are a good starting point
>> for a new user with unknown workflows. They are generic enough to tweak
>> Emacs in any possible direction. However, I believe that it would be a
>> good option to have several sets of defaults, which would better fit
>> some common use-cases, like programming, note-taking, tramp, git, etc.
>> Then, the existing defaults will represent "Generic" use-case, but a new
>> user (who may or may not have programming background) might easily
>> select other set of defaults, which is more suitable for the user's
>> background and expected use-cases.
>
> I think this solution was proposed by a few people a few months back,
> when this discussion started.  It would be nice if people came up with
> an idea as to how exactly this functionality is to be implemented, and a
> set of better usecases than just 'programming' or 'note-taking' or
> 'TRAMP' or 'git'.
>
> P.S: Please don't suggest things like `use-git-mode' or
> `use-tramp-mode'. That kind of thinking doesn't work out.

-- 
Ihor Radchenko,
PhD,
Center for Advancing Materials Performance from the Nanoscale (CAMP-nano)
State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Xi'an Jiaotong 
University, Xi'an, China
Email: yantar92@gmail.com, ihor_radchenko@alumni.sutd.edu.sg