How many typical Notepad users use ANY shortcuts as the basic keyboard operations? I'd say a tiny minority. A typical Notepad user that I've seen uses the mouse exclusively, and clicks around menu. Yes, that includes copy, paste, and save, the three operations that you'd think everyone would perform on keyboard. But, say, 50% of the users don't even do that. For 40% these three shortcuts are pretty much everything they do on the keyboard. The rest is the mouse. Perhaps, 10% are the users who only ever open Notepad, and try to use muscle memory from a more powerful editor.
Is that bad? No! From the perspective of unlearning, it's ideal! The problem that Emacs has is not so much that tyical Notepad users have to unlearn a ton of stuff, it's that they are not so eager to learn anything keyboard-oriented.
No amount of crippling Emacs would help there. It can only spoil it for existing happy users. As people mentioned in this thread, there are things that are aging (large files, freezes, whatnot) but the keybindings is something Emacsers actually like.
> No amount of crippling Emacs would help there. It can only spoil it for existing happy users.
I am surely against "crippling."
The initial topic of the discussion was how to make Emacs accessible to the new users. I don't suggest making fixed changes to anything, only allowing somebody to easily select different defaults which correspond with the keyboards available today. Today's keyboard has no meta key. Old keyboards didn't have a lot of keys that today's exist and have expected behavior in GUI -- potential Emacs user should have a possibility to turn on "consistent" behavior for everything that can be consistent, and the help should be easy to read without having to divine what META key in the "easy" case could even mean.
Of course the old users should be able to use old behavior.
What I talk about is what "amadeuspagel" also describes in a post here.
And to confirm that experience, until participating in this conversation, I also didn't know that it could be possible to efficiently use Emacs with the key combinations of some "more familiar to common people" editor.
And I'm still confused: if you say "Keep in mind that all three combinations are central to Emacs 1) C-c is used in million combinations 2) C-u too 3) C-v scrolls a page down."
What then? Does it mean that I can't use the "million combinations" if I want Ctrl-C to mean copy? What is then the start of "a million combinations"? Why should't help system simply adjust to display the "start of million of combinations" as the thing I selected at the start? If I like Ctrl K instead, couldn't that be "the start of the million of combinations"?
And why should I care that "C-v scrolls a page down"? The keyboards since at least 1987 have a physical "Page Down" key, why should I not use that then?
(And they surely don't have a physical "Meta" key).
I hope that's a usable example of what confuses at least one kind of a beginner.
Is that bad? No! From the perspective of unlearning, it's ideal! The problem that Emacs has is not so much that tyical Notepad users have to unlearn a ton of stuff, it's that they are not so eager to learn anything keyboard-oriented.
No amount of crippling Emacs would help there. It can only spoil it for existing happy users. As people mentioned in this thread, there are things that are aging (large files, freezes, whatnot) but the keybindings is something Emacsers actually like.