Re: Emacs learning curve

[Miles Bader]

Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:
>>>> There is absolutley no proof that CUA would 'ease' a new users
>>>> experience; there is proof that it would make make the experience
>>>> harder for all who are accustomed to emacs though.
>
> Of course there are evidence that CUA would make it easier in some
> respect for new users. They would immediately be able to use the CUA
> keys.

I think by "evidence," he meant actual data, not suppositions.

I've watched at least one CUA-accustomed complete Emacs noob learn
Emacs, and who didn't seemed bothered at all by the lack of C-x/etc
(they just used the menus for those things until they had become
accustomed to Emacs keys).

Would there have been some small gain in learning speed if C-x was
available?  Probably.  Would that gain have been justified by the costs
of supporting C-x?  Arguably not.

> Emacs is already mode dependent since it is using keybindings with
> several steps.

[That is not a mode in the normal sense -- people don't think of "oh,
I'll enter C-x mode, then hit C-s," they think of the entire thing
sequence as a single entity.  So the downsides normally attributed to
modality don't really apply.]

>> To illustrate: do we really want to consider the following a suitable
>> user experience for new users?  Once they type more than 5 keys per
>> second, CUA behavior will get replaced by native Emacs behavior?  That
>> sort of cleverness is not predictable to a new user.
>
> This is an excellent example of Kim's creativity to work around the
> resistance to adopt CUA bindings in Emacs. Of course this work around
> is not needed any more of CUA would be made a first class citizen in
> Emacs.

It's certainly a clever mechanism, and it's to Kim's credit that it
works as well as it does, but that doesn't make it any less of an
unreliable kludge.  It's _not_ something we want turned on by default.

> Of course this work around is not needed any more of CUA would be made
> a first class citizen in Emacs.

No doubt --- but the costs of doing that (which you constantly seem to
simply ignore) seem very high, and thus it is unlikely to happen.

-Miles

-- 
Opposition, n. In politics the party that prevents the Goverment from running
amok by hamstringing it.