Re: Adding a "misconceptions about Emacs" FAQ on the website

[Oleh Krehel]

Clément Pit--Claudel <address@hidden> writes:

> The top three I get are, from least to most frequent:
>
> * I'd love to use Emacs, but (I hear) it's very slow to start
>   (Answers include 'Not if you load packages properly, i.e. if you
> install them using package.el', 'Starting the GUI version is slower
> than the command line version', and 'Using an Emacs daemon makes Emacs
> resume instantly')
>
> * The keybindings are scary
>   (Answers include CUA-mode and viper/evil)
>
> * I could learn Emacs, but vi(m) is more useful because it's available 
> everywhere
>   (Answer is Tramp, which I've found people to be very impressed by)

That's a great summary, I see the exact same three points over and over.
It would be great to have these points very visible on the Emacs'
website.

A thought that was recently out there is the comparison of not Emacs
vs. Vim, but of Emacs vs. Notepad++. The latter is a magnitude more
popular than Emacs and magnitude less powerful. However, it does a great
job of addressing the above 3 points:

- Starts up reasonably fast by default.
- Has well known bindings of Notepad by default.
- Easy to install on Windows.

One more point that's important to most users is that it has
browser-like tabs and a nice theme, all by default.

So the idea I had for making Emacs more accessible is to:

- Add `notepad-mode' (to either ELPA or Core) that derives from
  `cua-mode' and further simplifies the bindings by e.g. rebinding
  "C-f", "C-b", "C-n", "C-p", "C-o", "C-t" etc. to stuff like
  `find-file', `save-buffer', `isearch', `switch-to-buffer'.
  It would also switch to a more pleasant theme than the default.

- Add `notepadify' command (to Core) that creates/replaces ~/.emacs to
  this content:

    (notepad-mode)

The idea of `notepad-mode' is to appeal to the 0-config crowd that wants
things to "just work".  It may seem that gathering more 0-config people
doesn't serve the Emacs project directly, since they're likely to have
low percentage of bug reports and code contribution. But the lower
percentage could be compensated by the sheer quantity of users.

regards,
Oleh