> Not when they're your employees!
> Only half joking,
+1 for the serious half. Totalitarianism is underrated.
> this confirms that different people have wildly different usage patterns
That is absolutely true. I didn't care about org-mode until a friend showed
me his Shakespeare.org file. I pressed tab on "Shakespeare" and it was like
hearing the Master of Puppets opening riff for the first time.
I've had one successful convert of a total non-programmer. He was studying
German, and I'd watch him in Firefox with ten tabs open trying to translate
a passage of Kritik der Reinen Vernunft. So then I showed him how to split
the screen in Emacs -- German original on top, English on the bottom -- and
how to fetch definitions on the fly from a dictionary server. Got him
hooked in a second.
I agree that working someone through Windows poses unique problems. I had
to debase myself and fire up Windows for the first time in years.
However, on the issue of tutorials, I did save my entire IM logs. It might
be an interesting presentation technique -- to read a real, natural
step-by-step working through of Emacs with someone completely computer
illiterate. It took two hours to get him to map a shortcut to a particular
file and get it to work. And there is so much knowledge and intuition we
take for granted: for example, to a lot of computer illiterate people, a
find-file function is "magical." So is a .emacs. He didn't understand why
he could newline arbitrarily before inserting new code, e.g., "So wait, why
is this file just empty? How does writing stuff here do anything to Emacs?"
It was very interesting psychologically to remind oneself of this state of
mind. To most people a program is a shortcut icon on the desktop, not a
bunch of disparate files that coalesce into something like Emacs.