RE: C-h K and C-h F in the Help menu

[Drew Adams]

        However I do not believe that accessing an item
        fast is of much importance in the help menus. Is it not
        more important to easily get an overview of what is there?

    I think that is a good point.  In Emacs, generally, the menus are not
    intended for speed.  If you want speed, you use the keyboard.  The
    menus are there to help beginners get an idea of what they can do.

Jumping in...

Yes, a very good point, Lennart.

I would add that menus can provide another advantage: They provide a certain
structuring, categorizing, or grouping of commands - not the only useful
organization, but often quite useful.

Menu organization can help you find a command. If you are looking for some
printing option or command, you can look in a Print menu. If you are looking
for help, look in the Help menu, and so on.

Of course, `apropos' offers similar functionality, but the grouping is
different - `apropos' works by command name (or keywords in the doc string).
Menu organization need pay no attention to command name, and it can provide
multiple levels of grouping. Consider all of the commands grouped under the
Help menu: many do not have "help" in their names or doc strings. Look at
the commands under Help > More Manuals: how many have "manual" in their
names? The point is not that menus are more useful than `apropos'; it is
that both are useful in different ways for finding a command.

Menu structure provides the advantages of a Yahoo or Google directory
structure, as opposed to search, which is basically what `apropos' provides.
Sometimes you prefer to just google-search, and sometimes it can be more
efficient to navigate the Google directory structure. And, of course, the
best is to be able to combine the two (as you can in Google, for instance):
navigate the directory and then search only a subtree. Emacs menu structure
is not as wide or deep as the Google directory, but the principle and the
advantages are the same.

Another consideration is learning. Because a menu structure is ~fixed,
repeated use of the menu to access commands helps you learn the menu
organization: which commands are associated with which other commands in the
same part of the tree. This forms a useful conceptual model for finding new,
related info: you know what the tree looks like, so you have an idea where
to look.

For this and other reasons mentioned above, it is important that the menu be
well organized. Although we sometimes have food-fight menu battles here, I'm
not sure that everyone considers the menu structure to be all that important
(e.g. for non-newbies too), precisely because there is sometimes the
background idea that only wimps and newbies will use the menu.

Taking advantage of menu organization is all the easier if menu items can be
accessed using completion (from the keyboard), and especially if one can
match a pattern (prefix or regexp) against any part(s) of the menu item name
and path. My library icicles-menu.el (somewhat similar to tmm) offers this,
for instance. I mention this functionality as a possibility for future
consideration (e.g. for enhancement of tmm). With it, I would argue that
using menus will not be only for wimps and newbies.

Here are some arguments and description, with an example:
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/IciclesMenu.