Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 4e23cd0 4/5: * mail/rmail.el (rmail-show-message-1): When displaying a mime message,

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 04/08/2015 01:48 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> I don't think think that's a valid comparison.  In Emacs, you chose what
> level of complexity you work at, and you can learn it gradually.  At a
> basic level, you can work Emacs with self-insert keys, arrow keys, and
> six or seven essential commands (C-g, C-x C-f, C-x C-s, C-x C-c, C-/, and
> one or two others).  All these commands are "simple", in the sense they
> don't require you to specify obscure options, or anything like that.

There's nothing interesting in Emacs on that level. I certainly wouldn't 
have been as productive in it as I am now if I stopped at it.

If you like, make an analogy to only working in a local Git repository, 
and only in one branch. It's easy, even somewhat useful, but not what 
most people do.

> In git, the complexity seems gratuitous - the user is exposed to the
> maximum level of detail possible rather than the minimum required to use
> it productively.

"Maximum" is an exaggeration. You don't have to know *that* much. And 
even being somewhat experienced in using Git, I only have a very vague 
understanding of its merge strategies. And that's an important area: 
Git's original goals included easy merging.

> This can be seen by comparing it with Mercurial, which
> has the same level of capability explained in a single man page of
> ~300kB, compared with git's man pages of over 2MB.

IIUC, Mercurial doesn't have lightweight branching. It now offers 
several branching options, and none of them is exactly analogous to 
Git's straightforward model. I mean, talk about simplicity:

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/