Re: RE: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2020 at 9:29 PM
> From: "Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>
> To: "John Yates" <john@yates-sheets.org>, "Dmitry Gutov" <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Cc: "Lars Ingebrigtsen" <larsi@gnus.org>, "Emacs developers" 
> <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> Subject: RE: Emacs Survey: Toolbars
>
> > 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.
> >
> > Folk using more featureful editors (emacs or otherwise) can be assumed
> > to have already mastered some of the fundamentals of editing text.  Put
> > another way, can we not assume that anyone, even those using emacs
> > for the very first time, has some notion of key bindings (even if those are
> > C-c, C-x and C-v) and expects New, Open, Save, SaveAs and Close on
> > a File menu?
>
> Actually, there are a fair number of GUI applications
> that pretty much require a lot of mouse clicking - no
> easy way to use the keyboard for many things.
>
> And of those there are a fair number that have lots
> of toolbar buttons/icons.  And in such contexts it
> can sometimes be quicker to click such a button than
> to access the equivalent menu item, which might be
> nested (whether from the menu bar or a popup menu).

Absolutely correct.  But many fail to properly realise that.

> Such things don't apply to Emacs, in the sense that
> you're not _required_ to use menus or a toolbar.  But
> their existence elsewhere might be an argument for
> Emacs supporting them.

It is on the opposite side of the spectrum.  If the trend in this discussion
continues, Emacs will be forcing you to use keybindings, no other option.
That is a regression.  Emacs must provide flexibilityon both aspects.  Or at
least the functionality to do so by writing some elisp.