Re: Interactive guide for new users (was: Re: Gather a list of confusions beginner tend to have)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2020 16:00:41 +0000
> From: Gregory Heytings <ghe@sdf.org>
> cc: casouri@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> > How would they even understand the doc strings without knowing what's a 
> > buffer and what's a window?  We have the Glossary section in the manual, 
> > for that very reason.
> 
> Again my point of view is: what are the most essential things that a user 
> needs to know to use Emacs if we have no more than three minutes?  The 
> point is to create a minimal configuration wizard / guided tour to 
> introduce them to the most essential things and help them to create a 
> minimal configuration with which they would feel "at home", instead of 
> having the "this is weird" feeling.

That is a very different goal from that of our tutorial (or any good
tutorial, IMO).  A tutorial should present the important workings of
the tool it describes, which includes all the basic operations and
ideas.

A user who has no more than 3 minutes can just start typing and use
the menus for the rest.  I believe Emacs supports all the features
such a user can expect: cursor motion with arrows and PageUp/PageDown,
text insertion and deletion, saving via the menus, etc.

But if you think such "3-minute users" need a document to get them
started, by all means, write such a document.  It is not what the
tutorial attempts to do, though.

> You mention "doc strings", but why on earth would a user who just started 
> using Emacs read doc strings?

To learn more about Emacs, of course.