On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 12:20 PM Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> wrote:
> But OTOH we have other buttons (New file, Open, Undo, Cut and Paste)
> that a lot of users expect from a text editor.
My sense is that such buttons made sense when a smaller fraction of the
population was computer literate. These days I would expect them only
on the most simplistic of editors, those still addressing absolute beginners.
I think this expectation is solid, but there's a wrinkle: If the toolbar is largely aimed at helping new users make use of emacs, then having an obvious way to do common functionality that _doesn't use the common bindings_ seems like a good use of toolbar space. Now that the buttons advertise the emacs bindings for these functions in a new-user-friendly way, they're potentially even more helpful, since they both provide a clear way to save/cut/copy/paste/undo, and they also teach the default emacs bindings for same.
--- Not fully correct. Toolbars assist those who suffer from pain pressing keys.
To this end, I'd suggest adding a button to the default toolbar that launches a short tutorial (in a new frame on gui systems), that talks about these common actions/bindings, with a next-step link describing why emacs uses these bindings and how to change them. It should also have an option to remove the tutorial-launching button from the toolbar.
I can probably put together a prototype of this if people would like, and I recall some pieces of similar ideas floating around emacs-devel in the past 6-8 months. Would this be interesting to people?
~Chad