Re: [External] : Make new buffer from menu

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 03 Dec 2022 20:27:21 +0000
> From: Heime <heimeborgia@protonmail.com>
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> 
> > This is why I stopped offering some to you.
> 
> There is significant difference between help and advice Tomas.
> 
> Imagine you are struggling to carry a bundle of blankets through
> a narrow door to a storage area, your hands are full, the blankets
> are heavy, and one of them catches on the door.  You ask a friend
> to help you.  He quickly goes to the door, unsticks the blanket
> and tosses it up over the other blankets so that you can keep moving
> forward.  That is help.

I'd say you need to adjust your mental model of the situation.

You are in an unfamiliar street of a large city in a foreign country.  There
are no friends anywhere around, only more-or-less well-meaning passers-by.
You are asking for directions to a place you have only a vague idea about,
in a language that you don't speak well.  Some of the passers-by might
misunderstand you, and give you directions to the wrong place.  Some others
might seem to tell you something important, perhaps pointing to a street map
on the next corner, but you don't understand them well, and the map is in a
language you cannot read well enough anyway.  Some others will maybe laugh
you off uttering something you don't understand.  Now, if you carefully use
the dictionary of that language (or maybe nowadays it would be Google
Translate ;-), and ask a specific enough question in terms the passers-by
understand, and if you are lucky enough to ask it someone who has more than
5 sec on their hands to stop and help you, and if that someone also happens
to know the place you are looking for and understand what it is from your
descriptions -- then you will get very concise and precise directions.
Otherwise, you will get a lot of well-meant information some of which is
borderline useless, some interesting to go over when you have more time, but
not relevant to what you are after now, and some complete hogwash, for any
number of reasons.

This is the kind of situation that requires skills to deal with.  One of the
potentially useful skills is to be able to read the map on the street
corner, the other is how to ask specific questions, yet another is how to
speak the language of those passers-by and minimize misunderstandings.  And
there are a few more.

But none of those skills is ingratitude, let alone hostility, to those who
try to help you as best they can, and for some reason don't hit the nail on
the head, or not at all.  Because more often than not, this is your fault,
not theirs, and they don't owe you anything.