Gather a list of confusions beginner tend to have

[Göktuğ Kayaalp]

> I think everybody would agree on attracting more people to use
> Emacs—that means more blogs and help, more contributor, etc. And
> people agree that Emacs isn’t as beginner-friendly as it could be. The
> problem is what to improve, and how.

Not necessarily.  Personally, I don’t see much benefit in trying to
appeal users that have no background in coding whatsoever, and users who
wouldn’t really benefit from what Emacs has to offer.

> As the first step, we should collect real experiences from real
> beginners: someone starts to use Emacs just recently (e.g., less than
> one year).

The major problem is that someone who fiddled with Emacs now and
couldn’t make use of it may think differently when a couple years later
they have some knowledge of programming (not necessarily professionally)
and some experience with other tools.

Anecdotally, I’ve picked up and quit Emacs multiple times before I
decided to stay with it.  And it’s been more than 6 years now that I’m
using it for the good part of my computing.  What was puzzling and weird
to me back then is useful and essential to me now.

What I mean is, what is good for newcomers, who are not guaranteed to
stay, can be irrelevant, not so good, or even off-putting to actual
users of this package of software.  Emacs is a power tool, and like all
power tools, requires two preconditions to be useful: 1) the user should
*need* the tool, and 2) the user should be willing to put in the time to
learn the tool.  And a good power tool is designed with user who need
and use them the most in mind.

IDK. IMHO, we shouldn’t break stuff in Emacs itself, and maybe promote
distros for people that want a more "modern" experience instead.  They
don’t have the backwards compatibility baggage of Emacs so they will do
it better than Emacs core nevertheless.

--
İ. Göktuğ Kayaalp / @cadadr / <https://www.gkayaalp.com/>
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