RE: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[Drew Adams]

> My sense is that such buttons made sense when a smaller fraction of the
> population was computer literate.  These days I would expect them only
> on the most simplistic of editors, those still addressing absolute beginners.
> 
> Folk using more featureful editors (emacs or otherwise) can be assumed
> to have already mastered some of the fundamentals of editing text.  Put
> another way, can we not assume that anyone, even those using emacs
> for the very first time, has some notion of key bindings (even if those are
> C-c, C-x and C-v) and expects New, Open, Save, SaveAs and Close on
> a File menu?

Actually, there are a fair number of GUI applications
that pretty much require a lot of mouse clicking - no
easy way to use the keyboard for many things.

And of those there are a fair number that have lots
of toolbar buttons/icons.  And in such contexts it
can sometimes be quicker to click such a button than
to access the equivalent menu item, which might be
nested (whether from the menu bar or a popup menu).

Such things don't apply to Emacs, in the sense that
you're not _required_ to use menus or a toolbar.  But
their existence elsewhere might be an argument for
Emacs supporting them.