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Re: How to make Emacs popular again.
From: |
Gregory Heytings |
Subject: |
Re: How to make Emacs popular again. |
Date: |
Wed, 07 Oct 2020 08:58:38 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Alpine 2.22 (NEB 394 2020-01-19) |
It does raise the question: how did the current Emacs users learn Emacs?
I can't speak for anyone else but I don't know that my own experiences
are in any way unique.
Thank you for this interesting question.
I can't speak for anyone else either, but FWIW here is what happend for
me. I just digged in my digital archives to find the first traces of my
use of Emacs. Apparently the oldest version of Emacs I used was 19.34.
In the oldest copies of the .emacs file I used at that time, I see mainly
two things:
1. settings to customize Emacs' visual appearance:
default-frame-alist: font, cursor-color, background-color,
vertical-scroll-bars nil
icon-title-format and frame-title-format: I was using (list " Emacs - "
'(-1 . "%s")), apparently to have a visual indication that gnuserv was
running
mode-line-format: in particular, I removed the "L" before the line number
and added columns with %c, I replaced the default "%14b" with "%b", and I
displayed time with (setq display-time-24hr-format t) or (setq
display-time-format ...) and (display-time)
font-lock-mode: (global-font-lock-mode t), (setq
font-lock-maximum-decoration t), (setq font-lock-maximum-size nil), and a
number of customized font-lock faces
menu-bar: apparently I sometimes (i.e., not always) disabled the menu bar
with (menu-bar-mode nil)
2. settings to customize Emacs' keyboard bindings:
(pc-selection-mode)
(CUA-mode t)
(global-set-key [home] 'beginning-of-line)
(global-set-key [end] 'end-of-line)
(global-set-key [C-home] 'beginning-of-buffer)
(global-set-key [C-end] 'end-of-buffer)
I vaguely remember that I stopped using CUA-mode after a year or two.
So it seems that, for me at that time as for newcomers today, the visual
appearance and keyboard settings were the main/only thing I was interested
in.
(I believe there is, however, an important difference between twenty years
ago and now: at that time it would have been as difficult to do such
customizations with other text editors as it was for Emacs (and with a
number of these other editors it would simply not have been possible to do
such customizations), so it was okay to spend some time on this.
Nowadays with other text editors these customizations are the first thing
you are asked to do, and you can do them with a few mouse clicks. Which
explains, I think, that the average user expectation is very different now
than it was twenty years ago.)
I learned first from the tutorial, then from some of the manuals, then
by doing and experimenting and reading more of the manuals, and trial
and error.
I remember that I tried to follow the tutorial, and that I never had the
patience to do so, because (IIRC) it spends too much time on things that
are (or at least appear) easy (moving around, which you can do with arrow
keys, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, ...).
Most of what I learned later was with C-h: C-h k, C-h l, C-h m, C-h f, C-h
v, C-h w. I also read parts of the manual (with Info) but found it less
useful than the built-in documentation. And, of course, I learned a lot
by trial and error.
Things are, in fact, very much easier now than when I started with Emacs
decades ago. Today, there is a wealth of on-line information, with
tutorials, how-tos, discussions, code samples, and help readily
available to anyone who asks politely.
Again I can't speak for you or anyone else, but I also remember (and my
digital archives confirm) that twenty years ago there was a "dotemacs"
website, which is I believe now at https://dotemacs.de , in which I found
many example configuration files, with many simple defuns.
- Re: GNU Dico - Re: How to make Emacs popular again., (continued)
- Re: GNU Dico - Re: How to make Emacs popular again., Jean Louis, 2020/10/01
- Re: How to make Emacs popular again., tomas, 2020/10/01
- Re: How to make Emacs popular again., Stefan Monnier, 2020/10/01
- Re: How to make Emacs popular again., Jean Louis, 2020/10/01
- Re: How to make Emacs popular again., chad, 2020/10/01
- Re: How to make Emacs popular again., Jean Louis, 2020/10/02
Re: How to make Emacs popular again., Juri Linkov, 2020/10/01
Re: How to make Emacs popular again., Richard Stallman, 2020/10/01
Re: How to make Emacs popular again., Dmitry Gutov, 2020/10/04
Re: How to make Emacs popular again.,
Gregory Heytings <=
Re: How to make Emacs popular again., Gregory Heytings, 2020/10/08
Re: How to make Emacs popular again., Robert Pluim, 2020/10/08