Re: Representation of the Emacs userbase on emacs-devel

[Hugo Thunnissen]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> With other words, emacs devs already think that default options are sane. So I
> don't think that wording here should be "enable sane defaults", but "enable
> different defaults". For example enable "VSCode like defaults" or enable
> "Eclipse like defaults" or something else.

Is it really different defaults that are required for users who come
from other editors to feel accommodated? Being a younger generation
emacs user and coming from other editors myself, the different keybinds
themselves weren't a problem for me. Finding out what they were though,
was more of a challenge. Of course there is C-h m to find about keybinds
in the current mode and C-h k to find out what a keybind does, but those
are not things someone knows about right off the bat. Especially when
people are my age, reading a manual about an editor before using it is
not a common thing to do. Because of the way UI/UX is these days, we
often expect to be guided into information. In that vain, what about
creating a keybind sheet in similar fashion to, but less comprehensive
than the one found here
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/refcards/pdf/refcard.pdf and making
that the startup screen for new users?

On another note, people coming from other editors often have some
default settings that they want to have replicated in emacs. Things like
tab or space indentation, tab size, dark or light theme, word wrapping
etc. VScode and Atom store general settings like that in a config.json
(vscode) or config.bson (atom) file that users are also allowed to
hand-edit. Maybe emacs can provide some conversion functionality that
lets a user paste in their config.json and tells them the equivalent
emacs configuration values for general default settings like that. I'm
not suggesting providing a completely similar experience to vscode, but
just the basic configuration that most users will want to carry over
between editors.


- Hugo