Re: Transient Mark Mode on by default

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

paul r wrote:
> I really agree, because I had the same experience. On the other hand,
> 5 years ago, I got really frustrated beginning on emacs, so much that
> I gave up. I came back to it 2 years later, because someone pushed me,
> gave me its .emacs, helped me to get hands on.

It is a very, very different situation if you are alone or if you know 
someone who have used Emacs. The complexity is much higher if you are 
all alone.

I think the complexity we meat is not a linear function of the number of 
details. Rather it is an exponential function. Our working memory is 
quite limited and perhaps one can think of this as like our mind have to 
swap between different sets of details if they get too many.

The way our mind works we need to reduce complexity. That is IMO really 
the magic behind mathematics and logics. It reduces complexity so even 
normal human can (more or less) understand things that are complex. 
(Paper and pencil visualisation is another marvelous tool to reduce 
complexity which I tend to use when I get stuck ;-) .)


> I think this, really, is a fundamental question : "On what criterion
> should we choose defaults ?"
>
> Here are some of my thoughts :
>  -  pushing educational ambition in default settings, really, is a big
> mistake. You want to educate, so improve tutorial, improve
> documentation, make more interactive tutorials. But do *not*
> deliberately harden the way for beginners.
>   -  It should *never* be a target make the default set so that gurus
> here can minimize the size of their .emacs, ideally having a void
> .emacs. Beginners should be comfortable using emacs, even with a void
> .emacs. Not advanced users.

(global-set-key [(control ?c) ?e] (lambda () (interactive) (find-file 
"~/.emacs")))

>   - never compromise the wonderfull ability of emacs to be fully
> customizable ( I do not worry too much about this one ;)
>
> What are yours ?

I agree with you and with RMS when he wrote:

"In Eclipse, these features are very visible and they "just work".
It would be good if that were true in Emacs also."


> Regards,
>
> -- Paul