Re: Scratch buffer annoyance

[Juri Linkov]

> I just did substantial work on both the fancy and text-only
> startup and about screens.  I put back PART of what was there before.

Please see my comments on your changes:

* fancy-startup-text:

"GNU Emacs" could be linked to "http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/"; similar
to how you linked "GNU/Linux" to "http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html";.

Unfortunately, you deleted the link to the customization of the startup
screen (but other text-only startup screens still have it).  This is
essential to make it easy for the user to disable the startup screen,
because it is useful mostly for beginners, and is annoying for other users.

Text-only startup screens are welcoming, but fancy startup screen is not:
i.e. text-only screen says "Welcome to GNU Emacs, one component ...",
but fancy startup screen simply says: "GNU Emacs is one component ..."
The fancy screen could say the same.

* normal-mouse-startup-screen:

The text-only no-mouse startup screen have a link to the *scratch* buffer,
but text-only mouse startup screen doesn't.  Is it needed?

* normal-no-mouse-startup-screen:

In two places of this screen, there are two adjacent empty lines ("\n\n\n").
This wastes space and makes the screen taller than 24 lines. Should
two empty lines be changed to one?

* fancy-about-text:

I think the About screen should not duplicate items available in the Help
menu, because usually users invoke the About screen from the main menu,
where they can see other items.  For instance, "GNU and Freedom" is
available under the menu "Help / About GNU".  "Emacs Tutorial" is available
under "Help / Emacs Tutorial".

What is still missing I think is "How to contribute" and "Contributors"
from the files CONTRIBUTE and AUTHORS.  But before making a link to these
files, perhaps they should be moved to the etc directory.

* normal-about-screen:

The text-only no-mouse about screen says:
"To follow a link, click Mouse-1 on it, or move to it and type RET."
I think we should delete text "click Mouse-1 on it".

* Help menu:

To make it easier for users to find the About menu item, we could follow
the convention that the About menu item is the last item in the Help menu.

So I propose to move two menu items

About Emacs
About GNU

to the end of the Help menu, replacing "Emacs Psychotherapist".
And to move "Emacs Psychotherapist" to be after "Send Bug Report..."
and "Emacs Known Problems", thus helping users to find it to overcome
frustrations caused by Emacs bugs and problems :-)

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/