Subject: bug#44983: Truncate long lines of grep output

From: Jean Louis <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2020 18:37:49 +0300

* Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> [2020-12-13 18:12]:
> > From: Juri Linkov <[email-masked]>
> > Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2020 22:42:13 +0200
> > Cc: [email-masked], Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
> > 
> > > I do not find it problematic. Grep is anyway kind of advanced tool. I
> > > think that Emacs "Search for files (grep)" menu option is anyway not
> > > user friendly.
> > > ...
> > > What would be more user friendly would be a form or wizard that would
> > > specify if all files are to be searched or recursively, and what would
> > > be the search term. That would degrade power of grep but it would be
> > > more user friendly to many people.
> > >
> > > In my opinion I believe that majority of users who ever clicked
> > > "Search Files (grep)" gave up after few attempts.
> > 
> > Indeed, "Search for files (grep)" menu option is not user friendly.
> 
> In what way is it not user-friendly?  It just invokes "M-x grep".

User of Emacs are many, just Debian GNU/Linux reports 16000 users
known from the popularity contest package. It is probably small
percentage of overall number of users. Recently there was Emacs survey
and they interviewed 7000 users. Emacs has many bugs but we do not get
enough bugs reported. The ratio is reported bugs does not nearly
correspond to number of users.

>From our view point it is user friendly. For me is user friendly if we
place Emacs functions in the menu without their descriptions.

>From view point of many thousands of users it is not user friendly and
means nothing.

What does Recursive grep means? You have to know command line to know
what it means. Majority of GNU/Linux users do not even use command
line or terminals. We use it, but we are not representative number of
users.

"Search files recursively" would be better useful meaning

"Recursive grep" is reserved for power users. It is user friendly for
subset of users, not for majority of users.

Message from my staff member who was using Emacs and went thoroughly
through Tutorial:

[18:34] Happiness > > I have one analysis question, without expectation:
> Would you know how to search files by using Emacs?
> Do you know what means "grep"?
> Do you know what is "recursive grep"?
> No need to look up, just tell me
I have learned it but it might need me to repeat again as in the
tutorial I was practising, not yet well captured these terms on memory

But tutorial is not related to those terms. She cannot know what I
mean possibly. She can write reports but would not, without special
explanation, understand what means "Recursive grep".