Re: Subject: Call for testers for GNU Hyperbole 5.12, a large, useful Emacs package

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 06/19/2016 11:58 PM, Robert Weiner wrote:

> People really like to talk abstractly here, which is fun, but doesn't
> help move things forward too far when you could just as easily describe
> exactly what you mean.

And from my side, the demo wasn't abstract enough: it described some 
things at a lower level, like press this, push that, instead of giving a 
brief overview of that all this stuff is about, and why I would want to 
push buttons. A button that computes a factorial is not particularly 
convincing, I could do that just as easily via an interactive function.

> Did you find the demo useful or not?  Did you
> like that it seemed more of a tutorial or not?

Somewhat, and no. It was overly long as a demo, it gave me a taste of 
understanding of what buttons mean in Hyperbole, but not why I would 
want to use them, as opposed to the regular tools (interactive functions 
and key bindings) that are already available in Emacs. Or maybe I was 
expecting too much.

Yes, buttons that link to an arbitrary files or directories, or that 
launch any command look neat, but it's not very obvious what kind of new 
and amazing workflows they allow, if any.

> There is a 150 page manual with extensive
> cross-references for more detail but a few more sections are yet to be
> written.

I hope you can forgive if I'm not in any hurry to spend time on that.

>     A demo is when you expend minimal effort and mostly observe the
>     niceties of a program/package/website/etc, in a condensed form.
>
>
> Hyperbole is highly interactive, so we want people to interact with it.

"Here are lots of buttons, click on them" would be fine. Maybe ease on 
on the terminology. You can tell the user to press S-mouse-2 without 
introducing the term "Action Key", etc.

And halfway through, the buttons stop, and the "demo" starts describing 
the normal Emacs features (maybe with some minor twists). Doesn't sound 
like demo material.

> I don't know want ACME is.   But what would you be switching from?

Switching from Emacs. Acme is/was a Plan 9 editor:

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/

> How
> else can you interactively create buttons with elisp actions in Emacs?

Never really felt the urge before.

>     - "Depress the Action Key somewhere within this paragraph
>     and while holding it down, depress the Assist Key." doesn't lead to
>     the desired effect, or maybe I just understand the instructions.
>
>
> I will check.  There was a problem with this but I believe it was fixed
> in 5.12.  You need to be holding down shift-mouse2 and then press
> shift-mouse3 or vice versa to see help for the first key pressed.

That would be "press", not "depress", wouldn't it? Still doesn't work, 
though.