> Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 23:55:08 -0600 (CST) > From: Luc Teirlinck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > CC: [email protected], [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > Care to share the details (what problems newbies are supposed to > have, but don't)? > > I do not want to seem to reopen recent discussions
I don't want to reopen them, either, but your wording seemed to imply there's a more general issue here, so it's probably worth discussing _as_ a more general one. > Plenty of stuff. For instance, something that has been discussed > recently, ^L being pagebreaks: they just figure that out very quickly > and they make plenty of use of it. > > There is the silly myth that regexps are useless to newbies. To > newbies, regexps are just spiced up strings and they get by perfectly > using plenty of regexps like "auto fill mode". [...] > I could give more examples, but I do not want to write a one hundred page > dissertation on the subject. If you think there are indeed misconceptions about newbies here, I'd say it does justify a dedicated discussion and more info. So please consider to give more examples. The two ones you gave above not necessarily indicate a pattern. The ^L issue was raised by one person, so I suggested to put an overlay on it, to make the separator more obvious. Would you like us to disregard such requests because we think everybody understands what ^L means? > What really confuses newbies (as well as experienced users) is > inconsistent behavior (such as traditional Emacs behavior and MS > Windows type behavior more or less randomly mixed together) The Windows type behavior is not limited to Windows. We normally make a point of consulting other GUI design guidelines (Gnome/GTK, KDE, etc.) before we change Emacs. > What obviously discourages people learning Emacs is too much change > in basic behavior from one Emacs version to the next. That's funny: I've heard many complaints that Emacs is too conservative in keeping old defaults in the face of the changes out there. _______________________________________________ emacs-pretest-bug mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-pretest-bug
