A proposal for a friendlier Emacs

[Nicola Manca]

Dear all,

following the recent discussions about a startup wizard and modern-mode 
I try to provide a suggestion.

What about having a startup screen, opening only if no .emacs or other 
user configuration file is found just saying (the text is just an example):

Welcome!
This is the first time you run Emacs, please choose how to proceed:

[] Go Vanilla!
  (standard defaults, no customizations)

[] Start Configuration Wizard
  (set-up your .emacs configuration file interactively)

[] Try Emacs in enhanced-mode
  (run with a predefined configuration showing emacs potential)

After this screen, the normal Emacs splash screen could me presented.

This mimics what many GNU/Linux distros already do, allowing minimal 
installation, full-featured installation or Live (no-installation.

The idea is that the option number 3 also enables a first-level menu 
item allowing to select among:
- Start the configuration wizard
- How enahnced mode works? (show the corresponding .emacs so the user 
can learn how to expand it)
- whatever you like...

This would define a minor mode, as Andrea suggested, whose source code 
users may employ to start building their own .emacs.
Such minor mode would be not intended to be used normally, since it will 
be subject to change often.

This solution would prevent the problem of passing --modern to the emacs 
exacutable and, beyond that, it could also correspond to emacs -Q, since 
choosing "Vanilla" would result in a normal clean startup.

How does it sounds?

best,
Nicola