RE: [External] : Re: What Questions are Worth Asking Emacs-Newcomers?

[Drew Adams]

> > "How discoverable is the help commands of Emacs?" is a question I
> > would like to have answered.  Seasoned users make use of the plentiful
> > help commands but new users seem to struggle to find it even though the
> > menu-bar has it in the same place every other software has it.  Perhaps
> > they don't think to explore the Help submenu because other software's
> > Help are mostly barren (only an About section!).

Yes, that's likely a main reason - they don't expect to
find very useful help in a Help menu any more.

> No, this is because they disable the menus (and the tool bar, and the
> tooltips, and the splash screen, and practically every other feature
> designed to guide new users into Emacs) in their blind mimicry of those
> luminaries who publish their configuration files for all and sundry to
> consume.
> 
> We all of us could do our part to stem the tide by refraining from
> giving encouragement to this practice.

+1, for menu-bar in particular.

Menu-bar menus can help anyone, no matter how Emacs-savvy.
Like apropos etc., they can help with discovery and in
case of forgetting exactly what something is called.

Keyboard access to menus and their items is also an aid,
especially if you can match any parts of an item's
"absolute" menu path, and especially if you can do so
progressively, e.g. completing/filtering to match parts.
La Carte is one library that helps with this:

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LaCarte
___


The tool-bar is not so helpful, IMO.  But there's a way
to not have it omnipresent, wasting space, but available
with a single click (or key), for one-off actions.  And
a way to show the tool-bar only on given frames.  And
ways to easily add items to the tool-bar.  (Could easily
be added to vanilla Emacs.)
See https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ToolBar#ToolBarPlus
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Turning off tooltips isn't so much of a loss, because
the same info appears in the echo area.  It's true that
a new user might not notice the messages there, but
when they do that serves as a lesson to look there for
messages - IOW, it helps with discovery of the echo area.
___


> > More of a personal curiosity: "How mouse-friendly is Emacs?"  I know
> > plenty of mouse tricks and for a supposedly keyboard-first application,
> > Emacs has a lot of convenient mouse commands so I am wondering how
> > other people make use of them, if they do.
> 
> In GUI environments there are a number of mouse operations that are
> without equal elsewhere, such as inter-program drag and drop and
> inserting the primary selection.  With the late increase in display
> resolution and size, it is also not nearly so feasible to navigate
> around a window as it once was without recourse to the mouse pointer.

In spite of what many of us believe or prefer, there's
no real substitute for a pointing device.  Aids such as
Avy provide a substitute/workaround to some extent, but
not really.  (They do have the advantage of leaving
hands on keyboard.  It's true that keyboard + mouse can
be a bother, depending on your use of them.)

Our context menus could be improved and extended, but
they too help with both access and discovery.  (It's
too bad that turning on context-menu support turns off
the traditional Emacs use of mouse-3.  `mouse3.el'
doesn't have that problem, but Emacs went another way.)