Re: Making Emacs more friendly to newcomers

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > Customize:
  > This feature is conceptually simple but I found it almost hostile to
  > interact with. Between, states and unintuitive input fields. I found it
  > hard to understand what many functions and variables were meant to do or
  > represent. The documentation for these values showed elisp, so I quickly
  > transitioned away from customize. I don't know what I would improve here
  > but I think that many new users are guided to this feature and I don't
  > recommend them to play with it from personal experiences.

I agree that it has big problems.

New users could tell us some aspects they notice as difficult.  I
don't think we can expect them to tell us what would make it better
for them -- not in general.

All I can suggest is for someone to try implementing a nicer interface
and invite some new users to try it, saying which aspects they find
less than ideal.  Then repeat.

Perhaps we should have separate customize code for graphical
displays.  I expect most new users use those.  If it doesn't have
to share code with the tty interface, it could be improved more.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)