Re: Making Emacs more newbie friendly

[Joe Bush]

MS Word, at it's start, was anything but intuitive. There was even a
'WordPerfect' mode for those migrating from that program, which I used
because it mapped the function keys to something I was familiar with.

That said, I think the whole 'user-friendly' notion is over-rated, and
misses the point. The only 'user-friendly' aspect that's worth
anything is having a 'friendly user' around to turn to. So if a newbie
is working around people who are using emacs, they'll learn emacs
faster. If they're working with people using MS Whatever, they'll
learn that faster.

And those who turn to emacs are, for the most part, doing so because
MS Whatever isn't fulfilling their needs anyway, even with the dancing
doo-dads,dialogs for everything, and pointy-clickey icons.