Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 15.12.2020 07:30, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Of 7.3K respondents, 5K disable toolbars, which is more than two
> thirds.  So perhaps toolbars should default to off?  I know toolbars
> were all the rage in the 90s, but that's apparently not the case now.
>
> Opinions?

I also think the poll is heavily biased in favor of either Reddit users 
(who are largely either power-users, or those who inspire to be), or 
experienced Emacs users in general.

For vast majority of them, disabling the toolbar is a trivial task. The 
ones who it really serves are less experienced users, non-programmers, 
etc. I don't think we have any significant data on that segment.

Furthermore, features like this can have a very strong survivor bias: if 
the toolbars are bad, users will disable them. But a better answer would 
be to improve them instead.

Rather than one poll, it might be worth more to look at similar programs 
(VS Code and IntelliJ IDEA come to mind) which both have a toolbar by 
default, but make it easy enough to disable the "distracting" elements 
of the UI for those who prefer them off.