Preventing the user shooting themself in the foot

[Austin Clements]

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 12:37 PM, Jameson Graef Rollins
<jrollins at finestructure.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 01 Jul 2011 09:26:48 +1200, Michael Hudson-Doyle <michael.hudson at canonical.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 29 Jun 2011 22:40:07 -0700, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote:
>> I'm come to strongly agree that this is the Right Way to process email
>> too, so should there be a keybinding for this last operation?  It should
>> tag the message (or the thread?) with, say, 'task', and then proceeded
>> as 'a' does.  'task' should be in the default searches you get in
>> the notmuch hello buffer.
>
> While I agree that Carl's method is pretty good, there is absolutely no
> "Right Way" to process email; it's a completely personal, subjective
> thing.  "Right Way" implies to me that other people *should* be
> processing their mail that way, which I disagree with.
>
> I'm generally against excessive unneeded configuration, but in the case
> of key bindings it's definitely necessary.  Fortunately emacs is so
> fundamentally flexible one can always modify the keybindings to their
> hearts content.

While that's true and opens endless possibilities for power users, the
defaults need to be suited to new users.  Nobody wants to use a tool
that takes endless configuration just to get started, especially since
that's when you least know what configuration you want.  Simple
bindings with predictable behaviors that allow users to express their
own workflow, even if it requires a few more keystrokes, make better
defaults than bindings that codify a particular workflow.  As users
become more adept at a tool, this enables them to *incrementally*
capture (and refine) their workflow as more optimized bindings.