Re: Emacs Book Vs Emacs Manuals

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord)
> Cc: <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> Date: Mon, 11 May 2015 11:53:32 +0100
> 
> >What's a tutorial about an editor supposed to start with, if not
> > basic cursor motion?  Which other editor has its tutorial start
> > with something else?
> 
> https://atom.io/docs/v0.198.0/
> 
> Starts with "why atom is cool".

Waste of the student's time, if you ask me.

But if someone wants to add a similar section to the Emacs tutorial
(with a "skip" button ;-), why not?

> Then explains basic concepts (including
> "buffers" which mean exactly the same thing as in Emacs). The packages.

And then, tada! "Moving in Atom".

So it's not so different, except that it risks losing its audience
while explaining the basics, which the Emacs tutorial does seamlessly
as part of describing the commands.

> It does have a section on moving around, including keybindings, but it
> starts by saying "using a mouse or the arrow keys works well".

So do we:

  You can also use the PageUp and PageDn keys to move by screenfuls, if
  your terminal has them, but you can edit more efficiently if you use
  C-v and M-v.
  [...]
  You can use the arrow keys, but it's more efficient to keep your hands
  in the standard position and use the commands C-p, C-b, C-f, and C-n.

> Their basic introduction also includes snippets, version control,
> autocomplete and folding.

Making the tutorial much longer.  But we could add some of that as
well.

And here's another example:

  http://linuxconfig.org/vim-tutorial

It also starts with cursor movement.