Comment by internet_points
6 months ago
Yeah, the menu bar thing just makes no sense. Here's what a completely uncustomized emacs looks like: https://i.imgur.com/0vFsd3p.png
If you for whatever reason absolutely need to run it in the terminal, then you'll have to either learn that F10 toggles the menu bar, but then it still looks like a real menu bar that you can navigate with the arrows and enter: https://i.imgur.com/ETA2Qhs.png (or you can `M-x xterm-mouse-mode` to use the mouse in the terminal).
(That said, I'm sure the out of the box experience with Borland was quite a bit better back in the day, if you only needed Pascal or C++ support. And emacs really could do with a better default-theme; e.g. simply changing to the built-in modus-vivendi-tinted and it looks like https://i.imgur.com/lRAWzJK.png instead. Doesn't help with the tool-bar icons from 1999 or whatever though)
> Here's what a completely uncustomized emacs looks like
I think that the key thing you're missing here is that the contents of the menu matter as well as the visual presentation.
Emacs's menus, in my (very) limited experience, expose a very strange hodgepodge of Emacs concepts and terms in a very odd grouping that presumably makes some kind of sense for Emacs folks.
I am not an Emacs person. I use CUA interfaces everywhere. This determines and specifies the names of the menus, which ones have (...) meaning that they lead to a dialog box, which ones have (->) which means they lead to a submenu, and they have standard options in standard places.
The Emacs ones are just... weird random noise, in a random layout, that makes no sense to me, and the few parts that are vaguely recognisable make little to no sense.
It's not just the presentation. Users of menu-driven tools need the presentation and the content and the organisation of the content.