Re: emacs user group in germany

[David Kastrup]

Carsten Weinberg <cweinberg@firemail.de> writes:

> On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 08:39:22 +0000
> Alan Mackenzie <none@example.invalid> wrote:
> 
> > ..and, of course, may also list some developers who aren't German
> > at all, but merely happen to live in Germany.  :-)
> 
> Guess the Germans should better stop fooling themselves. Nikolai
> Bezroukov is right. Just a couple of days ago one of the too many vi
> users called me an "traitor".

Which would imply that you were once a vi user.  Well, is he using
some fancy clone able to visit multiple buffers, able to deal with
cursor keys?  Call him a traitor right back.  Better change to
something entirely different rather than besmear the memories of an
editor for which a man page was adequate documentation.

vi is history; vim and elvis and nvi and others are nothing but
revisionism.

> "traitors" or not - there are still enough German emacs users there
> to found an emacs user group in Germany. Therefore let us discuss
> about the future user groups goals, and our motivation founding one.

Active proselytizing.  I recently posted a proposal on emacs-devel for
something that people agreed on might be called "assistants" (aka
wizards, gurus, whatever): an easy and conspicuous mechanism telling
people about available improvements and customizations to the current
major-mode that would have almost no performance or memory impacts
except when you actually called them.

For example, take minibuffer-mode: who knows about
iswitchb-mode, file-name-shadow-mode,
minibuffer-electric-default-mode and so on?

Useful for everybody, used by nobody.  It is one thing to have user
groups where people teach one another, but it would be another to
have some automatisms.  One needs only basic programming skills to
implement something like that, and the motivation would be to get
others to learn to use Emacs better.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum