Re: PROPOSAL: Repurpose one key and reserve it for third-party packages

[Leo Butler]

Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> writes:

>>> When you install a package whose purpose is to change the user
>>> interface, you expect it will change the user interface, don't you? 
>>> When you install an ad-blocker in your browser, you expect it will
>>> block ads, don't you?
>>
>> Again, the browser is a different situation.
>>
>
> For most users, it is not.  I guess you think the browser or GIMP are
> different situations, because you see them as mere tools, whereas you
> see Emacs as "more than a tool".  That's not the case for most Emacs
> users, for them Emacs is just a tool.  FWIW, when I open another
> editor, I see and use it as a mere tool for another task.

I agree with what Philip K. has written.

>
>>
>> This kind of aggressive behaviour just makes harder because you
>> don't know what is going on. This is how you confuse newcomers.

Agreed.

>>
>
> Regular users don't want to know what is going on, they don't care,
> and shouldn't have to care; for them an editor is just a tool for
> another task.

Sometimes, one really must understand what is going on.

I have found, through bitter experience, that expecting a piece of
software to 'just work' is a fool's paradise. My favourite example is a
bug I encountered in open/libreoffice where non-ascii digit characters
copied into a spreadsheet are simply treated as strings (and silently
coerced to 0 when doing arithmetic). I could go on a rant about how a
succession of developers have refused to fix the bug, how hard
libreoffice made it to even identify the bug, or how easy it would be to
fix it, but suffice it to say that 10 years later, the bug is still not
fixed and I use emacs.

Leo