Re: Problems with Emacs

[Vagn Johansen]

LanX <lanx.perl@googlemail.com> writes:

>> Could you expand on this, please?  I cannot deduce what exactly do you
>> mean here...
>
> you mostly need (at least basic) elisp know-how and much reading in
> the manuals to set up emacs to your needs.
>
> OK there is "customize group" but it's quite slow and very one
> dimensional.
>

Options > Customize from the menu bar will give access to the 
customize tree which you can click around in.

There is also the very cool customize-apropos which can dynamically
generate configuration buffers. Few other programs have this kind of
feature.

So there is easy customization of a *lot* of features.

The downside is that a new user is confronted with too many irrelevant
configuration options. Perhaps it could be fixed with a flag on an
option that marks if it important or often tweaked by Emacs
users. Then a filtered view could be presented.

> Other products have much more popup intuitive *dialogs* and icons.
>

What is unintuitive about the customize-group interface? There are
buttons for everything. Do you just mean that it looks different from
"normal" GUI programs?

> For instance customizing a compile&run command is much easier in
> Komodo, mode-compile isn't even part of the default installation.
>

Yes. Emacs lacks a way to define projects.

> Plugins - i.e. .el files - are much more rudimental than e.g. CPAN
> modules, which have a predefined installation path, testing and
> dependency resolving mechanism.
>
> Xemacs is in many aspect much more intuitive - for instance right-
> click produces a context menu which is the nowadays the expected
> behavior for newbies. Unfortunately many advanced packages fail to
> work in Xemacs, thats why I switched to GnuEmacs.
>
> If you look through the features of Komodo 
> http://www.activestate.com/komodo-ide/features
> you will notices that most of it are either built in emacs or
> available as extensions like ECB or regex-tool.
>
> But the user interface is much easier to handle - not only for
> beginners also for experienced users which can't remember all commands
> and are happy just to click on an icon.

Good points.

-- 
Vagn Johansen