Re: Gather a list of confusions beginner tend to have

[Richard Stallman]

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  > I think the sore points other than the undo/redo, were C-f not being bound
  > to find, (though that would need remapping forward-char), C-o not being
  > bound open file.

Thanks for telling us; that information may be useful.
Your experience was what it was, and cannot be denied.

It is not an option to change these basic key bindings to imitate
other, newer editors.  It would create a different editor that we
Emacs users would never switch to.  It is unfortunate that the people
who implemented the newer editors chose incompatibility with Emacs.

But I have an idea for how to teach beginners those keys.

Suppose that C-f ran a command that displayed this:

   Want to move forward?  Type C-f again.  Search is C-s.

After that, successive C-f's would move forward as usual.

The idea is you'd be given that binding by default as a beginner,
and you'd turn it off once you had learned C-f and C-s.

C-o could do something similar, saying

   Want to open a line?  Type C-o again.  Find File is C-x C-f.

Would you have found that helpful?


  > @yuan I was following the threads earlier and I checked the idea of a
  > profile was suggested
  > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-04/msg02032.html, I
  > think a starter wizard could go well with this as a base for keymaps at
  > least if you're thinking about implementing it (?).

I know in general what the word "profile" means, but what is your
concrete suggestion?  Also, what concretely would a "starter wizard"
do?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)