Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 16.12.2020 11:24, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:
>
> > I also think the poll is heavily biased in favor of either Reddit
> > users (who are largely either power-users, or those who inspire to
> > be), or experienced Emacs users in general.
>
> My impression is that that's not accurate -- there's certainly
> experienced people who hang out on the Emacs Reddit group, but there's
> also a lot of new users.  (And my guess is that the latter group is
> larger, based on the questions I see asked there.)

New users ask questions more often than the more experienced ones. There 
are 50K subscribers to r/emacs and 300 people online just now. Clearly, 
people asking questions are a minority.

> In the mega-thread about modernising Emacs, the common refrain was that
> we needed actual data on what users do.  We now have some data, and I
> don't think we should just dismiss that data because of statistical
> quibbles.

The question is how to contextualize the data and what to do about it.

I agree that the toolbars we have are probably less useful than they 
could be.

> I mean, look at the toolbar that happens when you "emacs -Q": You get an
> Emacs with a scratch buffer...  with a "Save" icon.  In a buffer that
> can't be saved.  That's how much attention we've spent on toolbars in
> two decades.

Well, it actually can be saved, as soon as you type something (C-x C-s 
works), and it's one of the real usage patterns. The button doesn't 
indicate that, though.

But OTOH we have other buttons (New file, Open, Undo, Cut and Paste) 
that a lot of users expect from a text editor.

> All the items in the *scratch* buffer toolbar are more natural for a
> menu, and they're already present there.

Maybe you're right. I checked back, and most contemporary text editors 
don't have a toolbar like we do.

Atom/Sublime/VS Code don't have this kind of editor toolbar. IDEA only 
has specialized toolbars for, like, debugging.

The recent versions of Kate (KDE editor) also seem to have removed it. 
GNOME Builder only has a small number of buttons, and they are on the 
title bar. Geany still has a toolbar, though.

Even MS Word, while it has a toolbar for certain features, has moved the 
basic edit buttons to the window titlebar and made them pretty small.