Re: Emacs Book Vs Emacs Manuals

[Stefan Monnier]

> What's a tutorial about an editor supposed to start with, if not basic
> cursor motion?

I think most users will already have used some kind of text editor
(e.g. text box in a browser, notepad, textedit, you name it, ...), so
they probably "know" how to navigate the text and aren't interested in
that, as a start.

I think it's good and important to talk about the different ways to
navigate (e.g. I'm particularly fond of sexp-navigation), but when
I present Emacs to my students, I never bother with the cursor-motion
part.  E.g. I talk instead about windows and buffers (e.g. the fact that
you can display a buffer in more that one window at the same time),
especially about C-x 1 to get rid of the pesky windows which may popup
along the way.

I also talk about indentation (since either they can't imagine that the
editor might do it for them, or on the contrary they're disappointed
that it doesn't happen 100% automatically, or because they're confusing
the TAB key, the insertion of TAB characters, and the notion of
indenting text to a "tabulation point", which they seem to sometimes
take from WYSIWYG word processors).


        Stefan