Re: How to make Emacs popular again.

[Gregory Heytings]

> It does raise the question: how did the current Emacs users learn Emacs? 
> I can't speak for anyone else but I don't know that my own experiences 
> are in any way unique.

Thank you for this interesting question.

I can't speak for anyone else either, but FWIW here is what happend for 
me.  I just digged in my digital archives to find the first traces of my 
use of Emacs.  Apparently the oldest version of Emacs I used was 19.34.

In the oldest copies of the .emacs file I used at that time, I see mainly 
two things:

1. settings to customize Emacs' visual appearance:

default-frame-alist: font, cursor-color, background-color, 
vertical-scroll-bars nil

icon-title-format and frame-title-format: I was using (list " Emacs - " 
'(-1 . "%s")), apparently to have a visual indication that gnuserv was 
running

mode-line-format: in particular, I removed the "L" before the line number 
and added columns with %c, I replaced the default "%14b" with "%b", and I 
displayed time with (setq display-time-24hr-format t) or (setq 
display-time-format ...) and (display-time)

font-lock-mode: (global-font-lock-mode t), (setq 
font-lock-maximum-decoration t), (setq font-lock-maximum-size nil), and a 
number of customized font-lock faces

menu-bar: apparently I sometimes (i.e., not always) disabled the menu bar 
with (menu-bar-mode nil)

2. settings to customize Emacs' keyboard bindings:

(pc-selection-mode)
(CUA-mode t)
(global-set-key [home] 'beginning-of-line)
(global-set-key [end] 'end-of-line)
(global-set-key [C-home] 'beginning-of-buffer)
(global-set-key [C-end] 'end-of-buffer)

I vaguely remember that I stopped using CUA-mode after a year or two.

So it seems that, for me at that time as for newcomers today, the visual 
appearance and keyboard settings were the main/only thing I was interested 
in.

(I believe there is, however, an important difference between twenty years 
ago and now: at that time it would have been as difficult to do such 
customizations with other text editors as it was for Emacs (and with a 
number of these other editors it would simply not have been possible to do 
such customizations), so it was okay to spend some time on this. 
Nowadays with other text editors these customizations are the first thing 
you are asked to do, and you can do them with a few mouse clicks.  Which 
explains, I think, that the average user expectation is very different now 
than it was twenty years ago.)

> I learned first from the tutorial, then from some of the manuals, then 
> by doing and experimenting and reading more of the manuals, and trial 
> and error.

I remember that I tried to follow the tutorial, and that I never had the 
patience to do so, because (IIRC) it spends too much time on things that 
are (or at least appear) easy (moving around, which you can do with arrow 
keys, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, ...).

Most of what I learned later was with C-h: C-h k, C-h l, C-h m, C-h f, C-h 
v, C-h w.  I also read parts of the manual (with Info) but found it less 
useful than the built-in documentation.  And, of course, I learned a lot 
by trial and error.

> Things are, in fact, very much easier now than when I started with Emacs 
> decades ago. Today, there is a wealth of on-line information, with 
> tutorials, how-tos, discussions, code samples, and help readily 
> available to anyone who asks politely.

Again I can't speak for you or anyone else, but I also remember (and my 
digital archives confirm) that twenty years ago there was a "dotemacs" 
website, which is I believe now at https://dotemacs.de , in which I found 
many example configuration files, with many simple defuns.