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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#21

Post by Ataraxic »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #16
microcolonel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody outside a minority of devs refers to Ctrl+c as C-c. First, C-c is not Ctrl + c; second, it really helps to use compact notation when you read a lot of keybindings; and third, this is approximately the most minor complication in the learning curve of Emacs (otherwise nobody would learn vim, with its insane key mappings and invisible mode transitions).

What is C-c? I have never used emacs so these comments are very confusing.

It's the notation for the shortcut Ctrl+c, which would be used in windows to copy and Ctrl+v for paste.

It's written in most emacs documentation as C-c for brevity.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#22

Post by acdha »

taeric wrote: post #2

Oddly, I think you will make Emacs appealing to users when you start asserting it is appealing to users. Few changes really needed. Just stop intimidating people before they get involved.

> I think you will make Emacs appealing to users when you start asserting it is appealing to users

I've worked with a lot of Emacs fans but everyone describes it as having a hefty learning curve. If you tell people it's appealing and the first experience is unpleasant, all you're going to do is convince them that you aren't a reliable source of advice. I think it would be much better to focus on easing that initial stage and explaining it a powerful tool which requires some up-front investment.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#23

Post by dmortin »

bitwize wrote: post #15
taeric wrote: post #2

Oddly, I think you will make Emacs appealing to users when you start asserting it is appealing to users. Few changes really needed. Just stop intimidating people before they get involved.

I like to tell the story of how secretaries in the 70s learned how to use and customize Multics Emacs with Emacs Lisp; they were told they were simply customizing their editor, not programming it.

I have doubts about this. Maybe they did some simple variable settings, but I doubt they wrote proper lisp programs.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#24

Post by zozbot234 »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #9

The kindest thing we could do for future programmers is let Emacs and all tty-oriented editors die. There are much better options now. UI has improved a lot since the 1970s, let's embrace it.

Even by the standards of terminal-based applications, Emacs is far from intuitive or attractive - the text-based IDE's from Microsoft ("Quick" series) and Borland ("Turbo" series) were significantly easier to use.

(As another example where *nix systems could improve a lot, the Midnight Commander tty app is great, but still not quite as intuitive as the old 'DOS Shell'. Weirdly enough, I find that other TUI apps, such as dselect and aptitude, are quite outstanding but you do need to be on a Debian-based system - they aren't a thing on Fedora or CentOS.)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#25

Post by Ataraxic »

Popularity is more of a marketing problem than an editor problem.

At the same time, if we compare emacs to vscode, vscode simply requires less configuration to get going. Given how much tooling exists in the javascript ecosystem, I think having a few plugins "just work" goes a long way.

Asking users to configure emacs from scratch to have a reasonable editing experience in their programming language of their choice is a lot. I think configurations like doom or spacemacs do a lot for this problem, but it really comes down to marketing.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#26

Post by whateveracct »

sdegutis wrote: post #13

There is a human aspect to software, and when you forget that, and try to force people to adapt to software instead of adapting software to people, you come up with software that naturally is difficult and unpleasant for people to use. Emacs is built on a philosophy of human nature that deemphasizes the subjective personal experience in favor of (a limited group of people’s theory of) the objective ideal experience.…

> In a short amount of time, VSCode and it’s ecosystem has almost equally matched what Emacs and its ecosystem took 30+ years to create.

I'm not $o $ure that'$ actually a$ impre$$ive a$ it $ound$ ;)

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#27

Post by jrimbault »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #16
microcolonel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody outside a minority of devs refers to Ctrl+c as C-c. First, C-c is not Ctrl + c; second, it really helps to use compact notation when you read a lot of keybindings; and third, this is approximately the most minor complication in the learning curve of Emacs (otherwise nobody would learn vim, with its insane key mappings and invisible mode transitions).

What is C-c? I have never used emacs so these comments are very confusing.

It's usually the Ctrl key, but most emacs users would rebind that. So it's not the Ctrl key.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#28

Post by dmortin »

Ataraxic wrote: post #25

Popularity is more of a marketing problem than an editor problem. At the same time, if we compare emacs to vscode, vscode simply requires less configuration to get going. Given how much tooling exists in the javascript ecosystem, I think having a few plugins "just work" goes a long way. Asking users to configure emacs from scratch to have a reasonable editing experience in their programming language of their choice i…

> if we compare emacs to vscode, vscode simply requires less configuration to get going

True, but then why do more people uses Vim than Emacs? Is it becase it's installed on servers and stuff?

I wonder what percent of desktop programmers use vim or emacs who don't need to do devops.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#29

Post by agentultra »

Does it need to be popular or need more users to become maintainers?

I use emacs because I can't imagine using anything else that has half the features and is harder to extend. I can't imagine why it needs to be popular. It's a programming environment that happens to have a text editor built in. That appeals to some folks but I can't imagine why someone interested in writing for publication would choose it over Scrivener or a word processor and why it's desirable to attract such users.

If I had a horse in the race I'd focus on the developer experience. Make it easier to extend, make the runtime faster (the native compilation stuff is super cool), better unicode support, alternate input methods, etc. If people want to use it for publishing it should be easy to write a package to cater to those users.

For me, a long time emacs user, I think the biggest concern I have is ensuring that the project is sustained by new developers.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#30

Post by talentedcoin »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #9

The kindest thing we could do for future programmers is let Emacs and all tty-oriented editors die. There are much better options now. UI has improved a lot since the 1970s, let's embrace it.

I’m sorry, what?

Which modern editor has tools like SLIME or CIDER?

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