Re: discoverability, better defaults and which-key in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>
> Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2024 08:00:22 +0100
> 
> Instead of Emacs finding out who is a new user or old, new and
> old users alike should find what they look for in Emacs.
> 
> With configuration, maybe one can have a FAQ specifically for
> that. If one has the 20 most common configuration use cases
> listed with Elisp one-liners to do it, that would be a good
> start. And beyond that, people already have experience anyway.

This idea came up several times here, and was met with a general
agreement, but no one stepped forward to work on those "most common
configurations".  And it is not easy to do, since the configurations
depend on the needs of the user (whether the user is a programmer and
in what language(s), what other tasks and jobs does the user want to
accomplish in Emacs -- email, todo items, etc.) and also some general
user preferences (mouse vs keyboard etc.).

Patches welcome, of course.

> Another case is finding code in core Emacs and in ELPA to do
> stuff so one don't spend time writing Elisp for that oneself.
> This is an area where I failed big time myself. Maybe today
> googling can offer more as much more code is available online?

The Emacs apropos commands, if used wisely, should help you.  You
might find that some of our documentation needs to be enhanced to make
discoverability easier, in which case please report the deficiencies,
so we could make this better.

> I for one would be very interested to know what of my Elisp
> I can discard in favor of using stuff in core Emacs.
> But I don't have a confident answer how to find out.

Some Emacs commands I suggest for this are:

  C-u M-x apropos
  M-x apropos-documentation
  C-h R elisp RET followed by 'i' (Info-index) and the subject