Re: A proposal for a friendlier Emacs

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   > It shouldn't be super intrusive if there is no .emacs, since it is
   > quite common to fire up Emacs without a .emacs.

   I think we should find a compromise here. If an experienced user stats 
   emacs without a .emacs present, he/she may disable this somehow (maybe 
   with --no-splash ?)

I think that would be annoying -- if I log in on a new machine that
I've never used, I'm sure I wont remeber passing any special switches
to Emacs to start it.

Why not just have it on the splash screen if there is no .emacs; and
if there is a .emacs remove that blurb.  We could add one or two lines
along the lines of M-x recover-session:

   If an Emacs session crashed recently, type M-x recover-session RET
   to recover the files you were editing.

E.g., (actual wording left for someone else) if there is no .emacs, we
show:

  You do not have a personal Emacs configuration file, you can go
  [Vanilla], start the [configuration wizard], or try Emacs with a
  different theme [different-theme-mode].

And if there is, we skip it.  And have some means of getting to the
wizard from the menu-bar, maybe even a way of selecting a list of
themes there too..

This wouldn't change how Emacs behaves, but still allow new or
experienced users to fiddle.