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

[Robert Pluim]

>>>>> On Wed, 13 May 2020 23:08:04 -0500, Karl Fogel <address@hidden> said:
    Karl> Here's a concrete example I've seen over and over:

    Karl> User does `C-x C-f' to find a file, but they hit Return at the wrong
    Karl> moment while typing the file path, causing a Dired buffer comes up
    Karl> visiting the file's directory.  The user is, of course, totally
    Karl> baffled by this result.  And yet it's obvious why this is a good
    Karl> default behavior for `find-file' -- for people who understand what's
    Karl> going on.

Are you proposing "you appear to be visiting a directory, would you
like to enable dired? [yes/no/once]"? That would be massively
annoying, but only once per feature, so I could live with it. Or we
could add an 'emacs-expert-user' variable (or should that be
'expert-emacs-user'? :-) ).

    Karl> If the proposed starter pack is going to mitigate effects like that
    Karl> for newcomers, it can only do so by making the keybound functionality
    Karl> space sparser -- which of course then lowers the reward-for-investment
    Karl> rate as the user gains expertise.  How do you propose solving that?
    Karl> Do we make an explicit "I'm ready to leave newcomer mode now" command?
    Karl> But that requires the user to make a guess about the moment of their
    Karl> graduation from newcomer to non-newcomer -- and this moment is
    Karl> mythical, since the learning is a continuous process with no discrete
    Karl> boundary.

disabled commands already offer this, no?

Robert