Re: GNU Emacs raison d'etre

[Sergey Organov]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Tak Kunihiro <address@hidden>
>> Date: Sat, 16 May 2020 09:56:30 +0900
>> Cc: Karl Fogel <address@hidden>, address@hidden,
>>  address@hidden, address@hidden
>> 
>> > We made this very simple a few years ago: Just keep typing C-g.
>> > I guess these users don't know that.
>> >
>> > Can anyone thing of a better way to teach them about this?
>> 
>> How about to click somewhere in main-buffer area to get him out of the
>> state and say `type C-g next time'?
>
> That would disable a very useful feature, whereby clicking somewhere
> else leaves the minibuffer active and allows you to do something else
> temporarily.

And here there are 2 more problems for newbies. They usually expect
pop-up /modal/ dialog to be thrown on them for anything but text input
or moving around. So, first, they miss minibuffer prompts entirely, and
then get to recursive editing all the time, unintentionally.

I'm not sure if it makes sense to implement "pop-up dialog minibuffer"
mode for newbies though, and then if it makes sense to (optionally?)
make it modal.

Yet another way to help would be making minibuffer modal by default.

-- Sergey