Emacs setup assistants

[Berndl, Klaus]

>> From: Ted Zlatanov <tzz at lifelogs.com>
>> Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 14:16:35 -0400
>> 
>> Power users don't need assistants.

>I disagree.  Power users don't need assistance in setting up something
>that they are already power users at.  But when they need to set up
>something they never did before, they could use assistance.  At least
>I do.

Me too - i consider myself as a power-user of Emacs and in most cases i would bet that i'm able to find out what i need by using apropos, the info-manual etc... but what i really hate is wasting my time by digging around all the manuals when setting up things could also be offered more simple by a well designed assistant.

It's always the same game: There a two takewrs in this game, one is the author of a software (e.g. a complex and powerful emacs-addon, like auctex, semantic, ecb, gnus etc. etc.) and the user of a software (here acting for all the other billions of users of the same software). And one of these two takers must invest time and effort to make this peace of software best usable: If the author desides to offer good manuals and also good assistants then he must invest maybe a lot of time and effort for this but all other users will save a lot of time. On the other hand, if the author of a software wants to save time then all users have to spend a lot of time.... now every one can compute for himself, what is better for all the time available at the world ;-)

IMO (X)Emacs  should offer a well designed backbone so package-authors (and the core-Emacs-authors too) can offer assistants so user's live will become  easier... The live of Emacs-newbies is hard enough ;-)

Klaus