Re: My emacs was upgraded and I am a novice again

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "David" == David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

David> Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> writes:
>> The fundamental discoverability problem with Emacs isn't that the
>> documentation is missing -- it never is.  The problem is, if you want
>> to find something by keyword, first you must guess the keyword that
>> the original author used.

David> Help/Search Documentation/Emacs Terminology

That's a nice page, but I don't think it is a real solution to the
general discoverability problem.  It helps a bit, but only a bit.

FWIW, I don't think this problem is a major thing.  It does mean that
many of Emacs' features probably go under-used.  Even with this hand
tied behind its back, it is still better than other editors :-)

Anyway, my experience is that when looking for something, I wind up
looking for it under some set of key words I choose.  Usually these
are similar enough to what the feature's author chose;less frequently,
I just miss completely.

Adding more key words to the docs helps this, of course.  But this
requires someone to find the feature, remember their wrong guesses,
report them, and then convince the maintainers to add some text.  So,
no wonder if it doesn't happen much.

Tom