Re: Transient Mark Mode on by default

[paul r]

2008/3/25, Bastien <address@hidden>:

> I don't follow this reasoning.  More than that: I think _nobody_ really
>  does -- yes, even you, Paul :)
>
>  Remember when you first learned Emacs?  Did it behave like you would
>  expect a text editor to behave?  At least for me the answer is no, it
>  behave in a radically new way.  And today I am quite happy Emacs did not
>  behave like I would have expected it to behave, otherwise it would just
>  be yet-another-editor.

I can remember precisely what I felt. And that is true I learned a lot
from emacs defaults.
But what I'm really concerned about is users giving up after a couple
of weeks because their productivity dropped below the acceptable
level. Those people will not learn *anything* from emacs, because they
simply won't use emacs at all. To put matter into context, I'm from
europe, I'm young as I just finished my studies. In my school,
everybody had to use emacs because it was the editor installed by
default. Today, less than 3% keep using it, and those people use it
because I almost enforced them to do so, and because I put hundreds of
lines in their .emacs. Emacs is full of very smart design decisions,
and I wished any newbie would have enough courage to discover them
all. Or at least I wished a lot would. But I think the learning path,
today, passes through unacceptable points for most people trying
emacs.
So back to my previous question :
--- "Should default settings have educational purpose ?"
-> If yes, then, please, make sure the learning path remains walkable
for most new comers. My opinion is that it isn't in its current state.
-> If no, then, emacs default settings should be chosen to minimize
the productivity drop encoutered when trying emacs.

I do not want default emacs to become a bloated gedit as someone
suggested. But I do not want the user base to lower in number so much
that the future would be really uncertain. A compromise must be found,
don't you think ?