Re: Making Emacs more newbie friendly

[PT]

On 18 Mar 2005 22:57:17 +0100, Pascal Bourguignon <spam@mouse-potato.com>  
wrote:

> PT <mailshield.gg@mailnull.com> writes:
>
> > I'm sure I'm not the first to come up with this idea, but I think it
> > really would help if emacs had a newbie-mode which made it easier for
> > newbies to get acquainted with it.
>
> C-h t

That's exactly what I meant. The key bindings shown in the tutorial are  
leftovers from a world when there were no arrow keys on keyboards.

I have some colleagues using VIM and Emacs and none of them use the  
standard keys for movement, all of them use the arrow keys. I've been  
using emacs for 6+ years, customized it inside out, wrote minor modes for  
it and yet I too use the arrow keys, not M-f and M-b and such.

I may sound like a heretic, but I don't think a newbie should learn new  
keybindings for cursor movement.

> > I don't even recommend emacs anymore when someone asks me for a good
> > editor, because they always complain about emacs being too foreign,
> > non-standard, etc.
> >
> > This newbie mode would be a simple command which when activated would
> > change default emacs settings, keybindings to as similar to a more
> > usual  editor as possible.
>
> M-x viper RET

VI is not a more usual editor. KEdit is. Notepad is.

> > This would include for example keybindings which are familiar for new
> > users:
> >
> >         F1 for help, F2 for save file, F3 for load file, etc.
>
> Where did you find these keybindings?  I've never seen them!  You call
> them Familiar???

You are probably a Unix veteran. They are familiar to anyone on Windows  
for example and much more friendly than C-x C-f.

> Better put:
>
> alias newbie-emacs=nano # or pico
>
> in your ~/.bashrc

Sigh. When some people sees how I work with Emacs they want to learn it.  
The idea is to relieve the initial pain of meeting Emacs the first time,  
so that they don't give it up in disgust, before they get to know it  
better.

--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/