Thanks for working on these "casual" Emacs packages. I've long thought it is lamentable that we mostly have two kinds of UIs:
* Those designed for power user speed, with seemingly little regard to novice-friendliness (e.g. bash, tar, find, Emacs calc, Vim).
* Those designed for novice-friendliness and aesthetics, with seemingly little regard to power user speed (many GUI programs, almost all websites, almost all phone apps).
It feels like we're very far from the Pareto frontier, and I wish more people thought explicitly in terms of getting closer to that frontier - that is, "how can we maximize novice-friendliness under the constraint of not lowering the speed ceiling even a bit". I think this could be done through some combination of autocompletion, cheatsheets that pop up automatically, and consistency between programs.
Magit-like UIs are a happy exception to the rule. Their speed ceiling is very high because they're completely keyboard-driven and have no animations, but their discoverability is good because they constantly pop up little cheatsheets of what keys you can press to trigger actions. I was able to start using Magit almost immediately after installing it, and learn it gradually without looking at external resources. Now I fly through the common operations on muscle memory, and it feels like it took no effort to get there. I hope that more programs copy this UI paradigm.
* Those designed for power user speed, with seemingly little regard to novice-friendliness (e.g. bash, tar, find, Emacs calc, Vim).
* Those designed for novice-friendliness and aesthetics, with seemingly little regard to power user speed (many GUI programs, almost all websites, almost all phone apps).
It feels like we're very far from the Pareto frontier, and I wish more people thought explicitly in terms of getting closer to that frontier - that is, "how can we maximize novice-friendliness under the constraint of not lowering the speed ceiling even a bit". I think this could be done through some combination of autocompletion, cheatsheets that pop up automatically, and consistency between programs.
Magit-like UIs are a happy exception to the rule. Their speed ceiling is very high because they're completely keyboard-driven and have no animations, but their discoverability is good because they constantly pop up little cheatsheets of what keys you can press to trigger actions. I was able to start using Magit almost immediately after installing it, and learn it gradually without looking at external resources. Now I fly through the common operations on muscle memory, and it feels like it took no effort to get there. I hope that more programs copy this UI paradigm.