Re: GNU Emacs raison d'etre

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 16.05.2020 15:34, Sergey Organov wrote:
> > > > > 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.
> > > > That happens in Emacs for some/many commands invoked via the menu bar.
> > > Then this must be rather easy to achieve for keyboard induced commands
> > > as well.
> > Not really.  When the user invokes a command from the menu, we have a
> > clear signal that the mouse is being used, and therefore can display a
> > GUI dialog without fear.  But when the user types "C-x C-f", how can
> > we know that he/she expects a dialog box and not a minibuffer prompt?
> My argument was that newbie never wants minibuffer prompt, so this is
> not an issue. I mean it'd always be dialog unless "newbie-mode" is
> turned off.

My anecdata shows otherwise: it's never been a problem personally.

As for the newbies who want modal dialogs, surely they will use the 
mouse and the toolbar to invoke the corresponding commands?