Re: Experimentally unbind M-o on the trunk

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 23:08:53 +0700
> Cc: Matt Armstrong <matt@rfc20.org>, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen 
> <larsi@gnus.org>, "Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@gnu.org>, 
>       Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org>, Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>, 
>       Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> The discovery scenario is: I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I
> can progressively narrow down the command space by choosing a submenu
> at each step. Once I’ve found the command I need, I can execute it
> right away and be done with it.

That only works well if you can guess, up front, which top-level menu
item has the command you are looking for.  Which is not easy, except
for a few trivial operations, especially with very large and
feature-rich programs like Emacs.  Traversing the entire menu
structure looking for what you want is not my idea of good time, even
though I have much more patience doing that than most newbies
nowadays.

Of course, putting more command on our menus cannot possibly hurt,
quite the contrary, so I'm not arguing against that.  I just very much
doubt we will be able to put there any significant fraction of the
hundreds of important commands we have to really make a difference.
To say nothing of the fact that there's a fashion out there to turn
off the menu bar very early in the user's learning curve.

Therefore, the idea to make discovery easier by means other than the
menus is a good one -- provided that we can find a way of implementing
that in a convenient and unintrusive manner.

> I will even go so far as to claim that such Emacs keymaps as C-x v
> are poor man’s menus — they let the user execute commands using long
> key sequences without the benefit of providing discovery and visual
> reassurance.

??? Typing '?' or C-h in the middle of any key sequence should (and
usually does) provide discovery.