Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2020 at 10:07 PM
> From: "Dmitry Gutov" <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> To: "Lars Ingebrigtsen" <larsi@gnus.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars
>
> On 15.12.2020 07:30, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> > Of 7.3K respondents, 5K disable toolbars, which is more than two
> > thirds.  So perhaps toolbars should default to off?  I know toolbars
> > were all the rage in the 90s, but that's apparently not the case now.
> >
> > Opinions?
>
> I also think the poll is heavily biased in favor of either Reddit users
> (who are largely either power-users, or those who inspire to be), or
> experienced Emacs users in general.
>
> For vast majority of them, disabling the toolbar is a trivial task. The
> ones who it really serves are less experienced users, non-programmers,
> etc. I don't think we have any significant data on that segment.
>
> Furthermore, features like this can have a very strong survivor bias: if
> the toolbars are bad, users will disable them. But a better answer would
> be to improve them instead.

Spot on.  There are aspects where certain modes are unwanted because they are 
not
feature complete.  Have found too many instances of lost opportunities in 
industry
where projects are forgotten in that way.

> Rather than one poll, it might be worth more to look at similar programs
> (VS Code and IntelliJ IDEA come to mind) which both have a toolbar by
> default, but make it easy enough to disable the "distracting" elements
> of the UI for those who prefer them off.
>
>