Re: Issues with emacs

[Corentin Henry]

Sorry, but I think the emacs documentation IS hard for a beginner like me.

• At the very beginning, I didn't know where to search ! I was navigating through pages an pages, and the more I read, the more I had to read.
• There is no "how to", whereas that's what people want nowadays. I don't want to spend time reading and understanding how emacs works, through pages of documentation (even if it is well written) ! I want to be told how to do what I want.
• The online manual is ugly... HTML is cool, but a little bit of CSS would improve the manual a lot.
  

2012/6/24 rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com>

On Jun 24, 7:39 am, ken <geb...@mousecar.com> wrote:

> 5. Make the elisp documentation and tutorials so easy and fun to learn
> that tons of people actually want to write code.

When I first started reading the emacs/elisp docs around 93 I found
them a model of clarity.
Has that changed much? I dont think so

Whats changed?  The fact that we are in 2012.
In those days it was completely natural to expect that somebody who
used a computer read a manual
Today thats a strange requirement to say the least.

Would a modern kid using a new phone/car expect to read a manual? The
fact is they dont (whereas oldies like me struggle to find them :-) )

And so you give them emacs along with a manual and they look at you
funny.

By chance they look inside and they find:
- there's  a key called Meta? Whazzat?
- C-p and C-n do up and down? Really?! (and whatever is C- ?)
- And when you tell them arrow keys work just fine they are ready with
a lock and key to put you away somewhere

tl;dr version: Saying that emacs manuals are not fun and easy to learn
is wrong.  Its just that reading them feels like 1980