I think that could be one reason why. A friend set me up with a starter kit later. Before that, I made a few attempts at vanilla emacs and gave up and I did not realize CUA mode existed until yesterday.
I understand it'd be much more helpful if I remembered the details, but it's been a while and I'm used to and very happy with the emacs defaults now. A more useful method would be to put a friend/colleague who's never used emacs in front of vanilla emacs and observe them figure it out (I'm sure some of us may have put them in front of it already).
The point I believe in is, It possible to make emacs easier for new users to be able to start working in emacs from the beginning without sacrificing any functionality for old users
This need not come from changing the defaults, but rather from a startup wizard or a profile which
sets the bindings/preferences according to what the user wants. This is useful
because a new user won't know enough e-lisp to make the editor do what he/she/they can work with.
@tomas While I understand your point, I think there's a difference between switching from emacs to vim/ vice versa (I don't complain about vim keybindings after using emacs and I wouldn't expect people to complain vice versa) and a new user who's only used C-x and C-c for cut and paste for all their life being exposed to emacs (or vim).
@Eli As for options for the configuration wizard, If I were to assume I was the audience being targeted when I started (an early 20s physics undergrad who wrote basic python and wanted a good LaTeX editor), I think I would be minimally happy with CUA mode with some basic AUCTeX setup. Maybe, some of the minimal options would be easy to flesh out?
Thanks,
Praharsh
On 2020-09-09 17:18 +03, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> The reason we didn't put these on the splash screen is because we have
> a menu bar, where everyone can find these popular commands without the
> need to read any instructions. Who will not know nowadays that to
> open a file, one need to click on "File" and look in the menu that
> drops down from that?
It looks like some of the starter kits / distributions are disabling
menu and toolbars.
We might ask them that they at least don’t disable menu-bar-mode by
default if that’s the case.
--
İ. Göktuğ Kayaalp / @cadadr / <https://www.gkayaalp.com/>
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