Re: evangelizing Emacs with a graphical tutorial

[David Kastrup]

Jason Spiro <address@hidden> writes:

> "Drew Adams" <address@hidden> wrote:
>> FWIW, here are some minor suggestions for the splash screen.
> [snip]
>
> I agree wholeheartedly with your suggestions.  I have one more: We
> should provide a clickable link to a graphical tutorial on the Emacs
> splash screen.
>
> http://stuff.mit.edu/iap/emacs/emacs-slides-1.pdf seems to be a good
> one.  It quickly covers the basics such as how to move the cursor.
> Then it gets to the useful stuff, such as the kill ring, isearch, etc.
>
> I took a show of hands at my school's LUG meeting today, and only 10%
> of the students used Emacs.  Nowadays, too many people use non-Free
> IDEs.  Is there any better way to show people the power of Emacs than
> a graphical tutorial?

Is that a trick question?  How about an interactive hands-on tutorial
running in Emacs itself?  Seems more useful for me, and we have that
already.  And it is not in a propretary format, and it does not
require a different program for display.

And for non-interactive use, it would appear that the Emacs reference
card covers a _lot_ more.  Maybe we should link to that in some
manner, like offering to call
(shell-command
  (format (mailcap-mime-info "application/postscript")
     (expand-file-name "refcard.ps" data-directory)))

> If I submit a patch to implement this link, will it be accepted?

Apart from the points above: what guarantee would we have that the
link does not go away in the next 5 years?

-- 
David Kastrup