Re: Emacs learning curve

[Wojciech Meyer]

Leo <address@hidden> writes:

> The recent proposal to use CUA and the like keys is just absurd. It
> treats everybody like idiots, newbies and current Emacs users. There is
> absolutely no evidence that all newbies want or are bothered by the 2 or
> 3 keys i.e. no evidence to go as far as to make it the default,
> including fiddling about those [C-insert] keys.

I think it has psychological meaning, saying, `if the standard keys are
so convoluted, how can I use whole power of *it*, I would need to spend
100+ years to use it'. I use happily S-insert for pasting most of time,
as it lies nearby arrows, for copying I use M-w (and yes there are
mistakes in other apps), but if I wanted I could easily switch to
C-insert (which BTW: is also situated near the arrows). I came from the
`CUA background' and at some point had those bindings co-notated in my
muscle memory. So either I am fast learning genius or the discussion
will not yield anything new. I am happy that C-x is a prefix key, and I
am happy that C-c is a prefix key as well, if it comes (as a trade-off)
with all the features (and how they are exposed) of Emacs.  To emphasise
I have been using Emacs for not that very long, and switched to it,
because I wanted, having at work visual studio 2001 to choose. It was
painful but worth.

That does not mean we should not work on user friendliness, that just
means that there would be a big price for CUA which personally I
wouldn't pay just for having two keys remapped.

As my conclusion, Amiga was a great computer before 94 (before it
collapsed), but her greatness didn't pair with marketing. To be clear
what I mean: Eclipse, Visual Studio is heavily advertised and sponsored
environment for developing main stream application, that's their success
not ours. Simple CUA support will never out-weight it. And do we want it
really?

Also, at my work almost everybody use either VIM or Emacs, and one
person Eclipse. One of them has changed to Emacs for convenience just
0.5 year ago, and he is fair user since, so there is no clear evidence
about lesser popularity, or difficulties catching up, it just depends on
the domain.

I believe also, who wants to be a hacker will be, no matter of
key-bindings, and the rest would anyway use the Notepad subset of Emacs.

> Leo

Wojciech