RE: Info tutorial is out of date

[Drew Adams]

    > Another in the Mouseless-That-Roared camp, eh? A small, but very
    > vocal and militant minority, apparently.

    It does not give you any thoughts that from your "majority", you are
    the only one to speak up?

Hmm, now that you mention it... Maybe emacs-devel is a bit out of touch with
noobs?

Nah, that's not fair. Maybe 3 or 4 people on emacs-devel are?

Nah, the point is that newbies are the target for the tutorial, and they are
not subscribed to the list. I'm not the only one who can speak for them, of
course, but I didn't see any arguments from you 3 that spoke to newbie
needs. You basically went on an anti-mouse rampage.

Newbies are overwhelmingly used to using a mouse. Let them do that while
they get the basics of Info. Save the teaching of why it's better to learn
to use the keyboard for later.

It is 100% irrelevant whether emacs-devel subscribers have or use a mouse.
The only relevant question for the issue at hand (Info) that has to do with
mouse vs keyboard is this: am I wrong that *newbies* are overwhelmingly used
to using a mouse? If I'm not wrong, then there is no reason to sidetrack the
start of the Info tutorial just to put them on the keyboard track.

    > The point is that we do not *have* to teach people how to get to
    > next and previous nodes (provided they have a mouse, which most
    > users do [OUCH!]).  That is advertised at the top of the buffer with
    > big blazing buttons. It's just, well, brain-dead obvious. If you
    > blindfold yourself, then you might need a tutorial to help you get
    > through the living room, but if you turn `blindfold-mode' OFF... it
    > hurts a lot less.
    >
    > We certainly don't need to spend the first several minutes of the
    > tutorial on `n' and `p', even for the mouseless. For the moused, we
    > can teach `n' and `p' later, after they know what Info is all
    > about. (Hint: it is not about `n' or `p'; it has something to do
    > with finding `Info'rmation.)

    The mouse can only be used for the most important functions as a
    fallback.  It does not make sense in a tutorial to focus on the less
    important functions first.

Your last sentence was precisely why I wrote my feedback.

The most important functions are `i', `s', `g', `l', SPC, DEL, and perhaps
`T' and `L' (and maybe even `M-n'). They are certainly *NOT* `n', `p', `u',
`d', and `m'.

I think that must be our basic disagreement: what are the most important
Info functions and features to teach? Do we need to start by teaching `n',
`p', `u', `d', and `m'?