Re: The minibuffer vs. Dialog Boxes (Re: Making XEmacs be more up-to-date)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2002 17:29:27 +0200
> From: Terje Bless <address@hidden>
> 
> >>The perfect feature needs no documentation because it's intuitively
> >>obvious how it works.
> >
> >This is only true for very simple features.  Powerful and flexible
> >features are normally complicated enough to require some documentation,
> >without which they are less useful than they could have been.
> 
> I disagree. This is IMO true of any feature, it just isn't possible to
> achieve in practice for more then a very small fraction of features.

Since I'm not interested in theretical possibilities that cannot be
realized in practice, it sounds like we agree ;-)

> My
> complaint here is that the Emacsen do not go far /enough/ in the direction
> of perfection and settle too easily.

Without specific examples (which you already declined to provide),
this complaint isn't useful, since we agree in principle that we
should try to avoid trading simplicity for power as much as possible.

> >Simplicity and power do contradict to
> >some degree.  I agree with the general tendency to not trade power for
> >simplicity, but in practice, beyond a certain level, power comes at the
> >expense of simplicity.  That's why other editors praised for their
> >simplicity are much less powerful than Emacs.
> 
> Ok, then we disagree here. Perhaps I'm just hopelessly optimistic, but I
> really do think it's possible to make Emacs easier to use without
> compromizing it's power, at least not unduly.

I don't think it's a question of optimism.  I think it's a question of
experience.