Re: Some developement questions

[Ergus]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 12:04:44PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: hw <address@hidden>
> > Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden
> > Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2018 03:00:32 +0200
> >
> > How do we make such proposals?  Should we post some or all of our
> > settings here, including self-written functions we call with non-default
> > key bindings?  What are the users we should have in mind?

For me this sounds perfect. What platform could we use for this? Does
fsf or savannah have something like feathub? or your plan to start a
survey? Because a mailing list I thing is not dynamic enough. 

In case of a survey it could be very useful with the right questions.

> My idea is to start with identifying particular classes of users, in
> terms of stuff they mostly do in Emacs, perhaps with a second
> gradation into 2 or 3 proficiency levels.

If we ask to the user the time he has been using emacs, the most
frequent uses he does (including languages, extra packages). We can
determine the levels. Statistics do the rest.

To share the survey we can add it to it'sfoss and related publications.

> Then making a list of
> settings each class/level generally wants to change from the built-in
> defaults.  When we have that, we could step back and see what to do
> with the data we collected.  For some, we might decide we want to
> change the defaults, end of story.  For others, we should discuss in
> what form(s) to expose the relevant options to each such group of
> users.

100% agree!

> That is just one idea, of course; other ideas for making progress are
> welcome.

I propose a simple online survey, but I don't know what platform will you 
approve for this:

Some of my proposed questions are: (more or less)

======================================

Objective questions:
-------------------

1) Time of experience and using emacs.

1.1) Age range (10-20; 20-30 ...)

2) Main working/use field (programming, writing, etc)

2.1) Do you use the preferences dialog or manual init.el editing in elisp?

3) if programming: ( Most used language(s) / packages / tools) (probably give 
some lists here)

4) Operative system / platform?

5) Do you use terminal or gui emacs?

6) Do you use emacs server?

7) What documentation do you use the most? (self documented in emacs, emacs 
wiki, what ever gives the web search)

8) Have you contributed to the emacs development in the past?

9) Have you contributed or created any emacs package?


Specific questions
------------------

1) What keybindings do you use? (default emacs, vim like modes (evile, 
evil-mode..), ergoemacs, god-emacs, other?)

2) Do you access or read the emacs mailing list? (frequently, rarely, never, is 
there a mailing list?)

?) Maybe add some questions depending of the languages he added in previous 
section.

Subjective questions
--------------------

1) Self qualification user level.

2) Self qualification e-lisp knowledge.

3) Why did you started using emacs (maybe give some possible options)

4) What you don't like of emacs.

5) What do you thing could be improved in emacs?

6) What new features should be included in emacs?

===================================

Of course all this is just a pre-pre-alpha proposal that I put here for your
consideration. I can help doing the survey once you tell me the platform you
approve to use. Once we all agree in a list of questions we can start
sharing it with a fix deadline.

Does it looks right for you?



> > (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.org\\'" . org-mode))
>
> This is already in the defaults.
>
> > (setq scroll-margin 0)
>
> This is the default.
>
> > (setq Man-width 75)
>
> Emacs nowadays calculates the width dynamically, depending on the
> dimensions of the window.
>
> > (load "~/emacs/my-mark-line")
>
> This is not really a setting ;-)