Re: Making Emacs more friendly to newcomers

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 21.04.2020 07:42, Po Lu wrote:
> Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > Please keep in mind that if we hope to make Emacs reach, say, 30%
> > share among programmers, the extra 25% would be new users.
>
> We should prioritize existing users over hypothetical users that don't
> even exist yet.

And then, another 20 years pass, the current users get too old/change 
careers/retire/etc, and Emacs's userbase shrinks even more.

I don't want Emacs to die out, and it will if we don't do the work of 
attracting new users.

> > So for all questions about changing defaults, we should ask ourselves,
> > do we prioritize the existing 5% (or 3%, as SO poll says) userbase
> > that will naturally continue shrinking over the years, or whether we
> > prefer to make life easier and more productive for the users that
> > should come later.
>
> One exists.  The other doesn't.
> Which one would you choose?

Also note that we don't really have the ability to poll even our 
existing users, to find out whether they would like a given change. Even 
disregarding those who would change their mind later.

> > And it's not like existing, long-time users can't grow to like the new
> > defaults (even after a certain amount of grumbling). I think the Xref
> > example shows that.
>
> Xref was bad enough. 

Give it time.

> Changing C-a to "select all" would be worse.

I didn't talk about that, but...

I think it's possible to support two sets of keybindings. That's 
definitely extra work, though.

Including simply designing a set of bindings that is both compatible 
with CUA and yet retains the current design principles to some extent 
(so far I have no good ideas on that front).