Subject: bug#37327: Simplifying access to built-in tutorial

From: Sebastian Urban <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2019 19:39:13 +0200

Hello,

I would like to present an idea of simplifying tutorial access, which
is described below.

1.  Change 'help-with-tutorial' to act like
     'help-with-tutorial-spec-language' by default.

2.  Remove 'help-with-tutorial-spec-language'.

3.  Change "Emacs Tutorial" in "Help" menu to "Emacs Tutorial...".

- The "(choose language)" part won't be needed, because there will be
   no other tutorial entry, so even unsure people will have to choose
   "Emacs Tutorial..." (dots because of additional choice in the next
   step, convention?).

4.  Remove "Emacs Tutorial (choose language)..." from "Help" menu.

5.  Remove key binding to Tutorial, i.e. 'C-h t', as it won't be
     needed.

- In the "Emacs manual" (Preface) there is

     "To run the tutorial, start Emacs and type C-h t."

   The problem is people may not know what 'C-h t' means, it's
   explained later in point "1.2 The Echo Area".  So it will be easier
   to tell them to go to menu bar, which is by default in both GUI and
   TUI Emacs, and click "Help" and then "Emacs Tutorial...", which is
   why key binding is not needed any more.  Of course this sentence
   will change to something like:

     "To run the tutorial, start Emacs and click `Help' in Menu Bar,
     then `Emacs Tutorial...' and choose language."

6.  Update "Emacs manual" in like 3 places (search for "tutorial").

7.  Optionally list of languages could use native languages names
     instead of English names, e.g. "Deutsch" or "Deutsch (German)" or
     "Deutsch (GER)" instead of "German".

- Unfortunately I'm not sure how well it would work with e.g. Chinese
   characters (slower loading time, because of the fonts).  Also
   I don't know whether these names are defined in Emacs or are they
   read from the file name.  If the former - redefine, if the latter -
   alias, i.e. Deutsch would point to file German?

In the end access will be more streamlined.  If someone wants tutorial
in his native or different language - it doesn't matter.  The path is
the same - no additional code (and menu entries), no guessing language
environment, etc.  As a bonus, one more free key to bind to something
useful, will be available.

S. U.

GNU Emacs 26.2 (build 1, i686-w64-mingw32) of 2019-04-13