Re: GNU Emacs raison d'etre

[excalamus]

May 14, 2020, 00:56 by address@hidden:

So there's some concrete guidance about *how* we might seek to improve the Getting Started guide (and other things like the Emacs web site, starter videos, etc):

* Tell newcomers up front that Emacs really starts to be worth it after a few years, not a few weeks. Set expectations right from the start.

* Show them some of the abilities they will eventually have, so that they can see why it's worth it to make the investment.

* Also tell them about the ways in which Emacs may frustrate them along the way, and explain that those frustrations are common and are sometimes inevitably entangled with the same things that make Emacs winning in the long term.

I could try to list more of those ways, if it would be helpful

Yes!  Please do!  I would like to contribute toward improving the internal guide(s).

I am very much interested in figuring out:

• what expectations we should set from the start
  
• what abilities users will learn, precisely
  
• what frustrations they will encounter and how to overcome them
  

Basically, I think Emacs could benefit from an explicit path to learning (i.e. a built in path). 

On StackExchange, I authored a popular response to "How to start learning Emacs Lisp" (https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/47318/how-can-i-start-learning-emacs-lisp/47320#47320).  That response garners votes regularly; it's information people want.  I think learning Emacs leads naturally to learning Emacs Lisp.

Since I update that response occasionally (and have written several unpublished updates to it), I feel I should just contribute officially.  If you can continue to share your experience, I think that would help me.

Here is the principle, reworded slightly after a suggestion from H. Dieter Wilhelm:

"GNU Emacs's raison d'être is to be the text manipulation environment that best rewards sustained user investment."

Having these kinds of characterizations, I think, helps "sell" Emacs' virtues. I have rewritten the intro (emacs) to try demonstrating this.  See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-05/msg01889.html

I am interested, what other virtues do people feel GNU Emacs has?