Re: Changes for emacs 28

[Ergus]

On Sun, Sep 06, 2020 at 03:32:02PM -0400, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>   Sorry but I can't understand why "old" users, that can write lisp lines
>   easily to their configs, can't understand that for new users (and
>   younger ones) those lines sometimes takes hours or days (mainly because
>   they don't know what/where/how to look for, and lisp is not so
>   popular or familiar these days). And that the first impression when they
>   open emacs is like going back to 1998.
>
> I think you need to make a stronger case as to why a user would spend,
> from day one, several hours or days to configure Emacs to be able to
> use it -- such an story would be very interesting to read to learn and
> understand what could be improved.  The list you suggested would
> barley have any impact on the experience of new users, but would have
> a large impact on people who have been using emacs for a long time.
Suppose that you come from a world more or less standard where you copy
with C-c paste with C-v cut with C-x undo with C-z and redo with C-S-z
or C-r; you also save with C-s and search with C-f.

In this same world you get that tabs insert tabs, complete with C-RET,
you search for all the documentation in internet not in the same
application and if you don't like the colors, the indentation, the
bindings or want to add line numbers or use a different font you go to
Preferences and it is done with 2 clicks.

In this same world there is an application's store you find in the bar
"install extension" or even a panel comes suggesting you what to
install. If you don't know how to do common operations you right click
on text and you get a panel with plenty of common options like copy
paste highlight all like this, replace, compile and so on.

I am NOT telling we should do all this, but this is what a young user
expects because all these is more or less standard everywhere else. To
anyone coming from that world it takes learning time to understand or
get used to ALL the changes, the Lisp parenthesis, the M-x, the new
names, get a smarter completion for it's use case, learn the common
bindings, debugging his config usually a copy-paste from somewhere
random on internet..

> We can turn the argument around as well, as users become more
> experienced they will add more of the "experienced" defaults to their
> configuration files -- making it a general waste of time trying to
> find those good defaults for experienced users, having to possibly
> reinvent the wheel over and over again.
They don't become experienced if they don't enter long enough and go for
any other alternative because is simpler, prettier, or just works out of
the box. 

> What new users will want is more or less from my experience the same
> as what experienced users expect to see, to open and edit files, have
> navigation or auto-popup-completion -- both which I think would be
> nice to see as standard for common modes (not just programming, and
> working as well as emacs-lisp-mode and eldoc-mode).  They will
> probobly want to have some sort of WYSIWYG feature for writting notes.
Go for Atom, VSCode, Sublime Text and see what the users wants
there. There are very active forums and plenty of packages because these
editors has 10 times more users than emacs with just 2 or 3 years of
existence.