Re: Changes for emacs 28

[Gregory Heytings]

> Instead of discussing new, radical defaults (which I don't think are 
> going to go anywhere, because annoying older users isn't nice), we could 
> just put a button on the opening splash page saying
>
>     Current theme: Classic.  Click HERE to get the super-cool rad one.
>
> And then the HERE could enable whatever the kids these days want, and it 
> could be ALL the mod cons.

Would it not be better to have a "guided tour" (something like C-h t, but 
shorter and more "modern") for first-time users (those without a .emacs / 
.emacs.d)?  This is quite common in "modern" software, so it would not 
surprise anyone.

During that "guided tour" the user could select a number of options, e.g. 
cua-mode, evil-mode, which-key, hl-line, show-paren-mode, a theme 
(customize-themes is there since Emacs 24, with a number builtin themes, 
currently sixteen), and these options would be written in their .emacs 
file.

(In fact, it would perhaps make sense to create a few guided tours, with 
an initial question "Are you a programmer? a scientist? a teacher? a 
writer?" with which the set of options could be narrowed.)

With this it would be unnecessary to change any of the defaults, yet 
newcomers would quickly be able to tailor some aspects of Emacs to their 
needs.

A side-effect is that the discussions here would perhaps be less 
passionated.  "Should feature X be offered as an option to first-time 
users?" may lead to more serene discussions than "Should feature X become 
a default in future Emacs versions?"