Jan 2, 2022, 12:07 by casouri@gmail.com:
> Maybe that’s true for some users. I had my fair share of struggle and confusion with custom when I started using Emacs. IME a few lines of setq, global-set-key and xxx-mode are simpler and more predicable than custom. Neither of us has surveyed enough number of new Emacs users, so I don’t think we can make definitive claims. For example, I don’t think it is unacceptable to expect a user to understand what does setq, global-set-key or xxx-mode means.
> ...
> It is hard for the user to find them. Plus other problems with custom and Customize described above that you don’t seem to mind. Aren’t they confusing for even a not-so-new user? They surely confused and annoyed me for a long time back then.
>
> Yuan
>
1+
This has also been my experience when starting out and for some others I know.
In theory Custom system should have made things easier, but it didn't.
Later on when I understood Elisp better, I had some ideas as to why. Basically
Custom is an unfinished system, it's code is not easy to understand, and it
does not integrate with the rest of Emacs well, it especially does not play well
with configuring things from init.el file. Until it is more polished, I would be
hesitant to recommended it to newcomers, over doing a couple of setq's.
+1 here too.
What about including in the description of the package a screenshot an
example of the generated init block as text, and explaining that your
package is for the people who don't mind looking at the internal
representation of the configurations, that looks like that?...
Btw, one thing that works well for me is explaining to new users that
_reading_ is very different from _writing_, and that they will need to
to be able to read the configuration block in Lisp and understand
_vaguely_ the meaning of _some parts_ of it... they do not need to
understand it fully, and they don't need to learn to write Lisp
themselves.
Cheers,
Eduardo Ochs
http://angg.twu.net/#eev