RE: What is the most useful potential feature which Emacs lacks?

[Drew Adams]

> If it's every time, that punishes experienced users, who do `find-file'
> on directories deliberately and don't want an extra keystroke to get in
> the way.
> 
> If it's only the first time, then I think it has other disadvantages:
> 
> - It doesn't really help the new user know what's going on or what's
> about to happen.
> 
> - It mis-trains them to think that when they do `find-file' on a
> directory they'll be asked for confirmation, when actually that's only
> going to happen this one time.  (Or maybe they have to set some
> variable to get what we currently consider the "normal" behavior?  But
> that's adding even complexity.)
> 
> I admit that I'm basically using this as Yet Another Example of how
> newcomer-friendliness is inherently in tension with rewards-investors
> :-).  It's hard to make find-file-on-a-directory less surprising for
> newcomers without either reducing the feature's investability (that is,
> without reducing a persistent new user's ability to learn about it by
> digesting a surprise and comprehending it) or reducing the feature's
> utility to the experienced users who are already familiar with it.
> 
> So, IMHO, we should change nothing about Emacs's behavior here: I think
> `find-file' does the best thing it can do right now.
> 
> (However, maybe it would be good to cover this behavior, or at least
> warn about it, in the tutorial or in other new-user help documentation
> -- I haven't looked at that documentation in a long time, so I can't
> say for sure.)

+1, for everything.