Eli Zaretskii wrote: Care to share the details (what problems newbies are supposed to have, but don't)?
I do not want to seem to reopen recent discussions, but since you explicitly ask for it: Plenty of stuff. For instance, something that has been discussed recently, ^L being pagebreaks: they just figure that out very quickly and they make plenty of use of it. There is the silly myth that regexps are useless to newbies. To newbies, regexps are just spiced up strings and they get by perfectly using plenty of regexps like "auto fill mode". If that is going to find anything matching two or more of these words, now _that_ is going to confuse them. It has been said : "experienced users can always use "auto +fill mode" if they want a regexp, but that is forcing unobvious tricks on _newbies_, who are the most likely to use regexps without any special characters. Of course, what also confuses them is that in Emacs, the regexp "auto fill mode" sometimes matches "auto fill mode" even when spread over several lines (which is usually what they really want) and sometimes not, depending on the Emacs function they use. Apart from that, people can pretty painlessly slowly graduate from using exclusively the "auto fill type" regexp to more and more complicated stuff, if they feel that need. I could give more examples, but I do not want to write a one hundred page dissertation on the subject. What really confuses newbies (as well as experienced users) is inconsistent behavior (such as traditional Emacs behavior and MS Windows type behavior more or less randomly mixed together), lack of transparency (such as abusive use of invisibility and display properties, a very bad problem in Info, leading to surprises while yanking or while printing off stuff). What obviously discourages people learning Emacs is too much change in basic behavior from one Emacs version to the next. It makes too much of what they have learned useless. Sincerely, Luc. _______________________________________________ emacs-pretest-bug mailing list emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-pretest-bug
