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Re: [h-e-w] new user keybindings


From: Stephen Leake
Subject: Re: [h-e-w] new user keybindings
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 16:15:15 -0400
User-agent: Gnus/5.1006 (Gnus v5.10.6) Emacs/21.3 (windows-nt)

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: "Drew Adams" <address@hidden>
>> Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 22:43:03 -0700
>> 
>>     The philosophy is that the default Emacs should
>>     work well enough for the new user not to be
>>     bothered by customization for quite some time.
>> 
>> It's not a question of bother. Setting preferences in most UI applications
>> is not something users do only exceptionally and only because they are
>> bothered. This is all the more true of Emacs customization. Customization is
>> a part of normal Emacs use even more than it is part of the use of other
>> apps. Emacs *is* customization, in oh so many ways. Do you want to
>> customize? Get Emacs. It doesn't matter what - you can customize anything
>> with Emacs.
>
> My point is that customization is a sufficiently advanced issue, so
> new users should get used to Emacs and read the docs for some time
> before they embark on the never-ending customize adventure.
> Meanwhile, they have the Options menu to start with.

In general, I agree that customization is an advanced issue. However,
I think key bindings are an exception.

Learning a new set of keybindings is a significant impediment to
adopting Emacs.

Other IDE's have several sets of keybindings that are easy to choose;
keybindings that mimic other popular IDEs are available. I don't have
much experience with those (I've used Emacs for a _long_ time :), so I
don't know how well that works in practice. But it does seem like
something similar could be done (perhaps has been done?) for Emacs. I
know there is some sort of "Windows 32" keybinding; as others have
pointed out, that's not well defined.

Perhaps some discussion of the sets of "popular" keybindings that have
been developed would be appropriate in the tutorial/top level Emacs
manual.

When I introduce someone to Emacs, I give them my keybindings as an
example, and offer to fix/change anything that bothers them. That
helps a lot in getting past the initial learning curve.

The menu also helps.

-- 
-- Stephe





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