Current bindings? What's that? That's not everyday language, that's
computerese. And as for regular expression matching, sure you get
a list of all the functions, but their descriptions are minimal and
they DON'T TELL YOU HOW TO INVOKE THE FUNCTION!!! For example,
I just spent five minutes trying to set some text to some other
font. I really did try, and I was unsuccessful. I think I'm no
closer than I was five minutes ago. In Word, it takes me about
7 seconds to change the font of selected text. I'm sure once you
know how to do it, and write it down so that you don't forget,
you can do it that quickly in Emacs too. But a new user of Word
would be able to figure it out quite quickly, and wouldn't have
to write it down.
Perhaps you don't think this is important. It IS important to most
computer users. Most of us would rather spend our time using
programs than writing them, especially when they already exist,
I know there are lots of ways to get information, but it typically
takes me at least five minutes to find what I'm looking for, if I
find it at all, in Emacs. I don't have these problems with most software.
Don't get me wrong, I like Emacs. For certain things. But, though
it may be easy for you and it may be easy for your wife, it's anything
but easy, user-friendly, or intuitive to me....
> And yes, you are right that it really helps to know Lisp if you're
> going to do advanced things with Emacs, but you don't have to. For
> instance, my wife Helena has recently finished her first thesis in
> Anthropology, a really good thing about hacker humour (in Swedish, I'm
> afraid) and she wrote it with GNU Emacs 19.30 under X11, marking the
> text with LaTeX and viewing the result with xdvi. Helenas is by no
> means a power user and has almost no previous experience of Emacs or
> LaTeX.
>
> > This is the reason people's definition of a good operating system
> > is so varied. To an experienced hacker or computer scientist, things
> > like emacs, which are powerful but which take an everyday user ages
> > to learn, are beautiful. Most of us want something we can start up
> > and start typing or whatever - and if we want to try something else
> > we look in the menus and then in the help.
>
> Ah, but I agree. The great thing with computers is that you can make
> them behave in *any* way. I want the interface to be utterly flexible,
> so any user, whatever level, can feel right at home. This is the
> Proper Thing to do.
Okay, but I bet most non-technical people wouldn't feel right at home
in front of Emacs.
> --
> Mikael "MC" Cardell <mc@hack.org>
> Hacker of convivial tools
> "I'd rather write programs that write programs than write programs"
> Dick Sites, DEC
Mike
----------------------------- _/ /\/\ /\/ ----------------------------
J. Michael New Michael.New@NRC.Ca
Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Institute (613)991-4371
National Research Council of Canada home: (613)230-7783
"Star Trek transporter: the ultimate Cut and Paste"
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