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Making Emacs Popular Again

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Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#51
How on earth was RMS unfamiliar with the existence of Org Mode, and how on earth was RMS unfamiliar with the concept of outliners, and why on earth, when he finally figured out what Org Mode did, was his immediate response to be super dismissive because it wasn't something that he's interested in using personally?

He sounds like some random person spewing random subjective opinions about things, rather than the original author of GNU Emacs making an honest effort to provide leadership and guidance that means something (anything) to anyone other than himself. He sounds helpless and oblivious to everything and everyone except his own personal proclivities, which is the opposite of leadership and the opposite of an experienced person providing valuable guidance to the community. Like he's not even making a token effort to do those things, and to say he's metaphorically lifting a finger here to provide leadership and guidance would be very generous.

This is akin to Linus rejecting a driver because he doesn't own the hardware, or because he doesn't like the colors of logo of the company that makes it. It really doesn't get more incurious and intellectually/emotionally immature than that.

This is in 2020, after a couple decades of Emacs being one of the only actual software projects he involves himself in anymore. To be clear, I've had a really low opinion of RMS for going on 20 years now (after a few years in college where I thought he was cool because I didn't know any better and people seemed to revere him because they thought everyone else revered him). But reading these mailing list exchanges are still kind of shocking to me. It's really hard to believe that anyone on the GNU mailing lists pay any attention to him at all, or values his opinion on anything. For those that do, surely that's nothing more than a cult of personality, it just seems as plain as day to me. This is exactly the sort of thing that drives people away from GNU and the FSF, and it sucks because they could be so much more impactful and meaningful and helpful and positive and constructive otherwise.

Sometimes I think if more people had simply stopped making excuses for RMS like 20 years ago, we might currently be living in some sort of GNU utopia dreamworld where everyone everywhere uses Emacs for everything, and GCC is the preeminent compiler suite, etc. etc. etc. It's quite a high cost for people to pay, when the only thing they get in return for keeping this guy around is helping a damaged narcissist continue to feel good about himself and continue alienating everyone else, just like he's been doing for decades. He absolutely got GNU and the FSF off the ground and helped create a large community that has produced tons of great software, but in the past 25 years it seems like all of his efforts have been counterproductive to his own goals.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#53

Outside of the text editor, I think native emacs keybindings like (C-n, C-p, C-a, C-e, C-k) on OSX are great and I hope they never get rid of them.

Please never get rid of this

As a user of these key binding in both Emacs and macOS, it’d be worse than cutting off an arm if this went away

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Emacs' notation for keybindings uses C for indicating the Ctrl/Cmd key and M for the Meta (alt). Things like C-c C-v are chords. and . I might be wrong, but I believe that the reason that parent commenter said that "C is not Ctrl" is due to the fact that you can map these keys to any where you want. Most emacs and lispers prefer to have C key bound to caps lock.

C-c is a chord (two keys pressed at once); C-c C-v is a chord progression (first one chord, then the other), more often referred as a sequence in this context.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#55

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.

(1) There is GUI Emacs (what you should probably use).

(2) There's no better environment available for dealing with text (including notes, papers, slides, email, &c.) than Emacs.

Why do you hate future programmers so much?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#56
post #32

I think a large part of the issue is the default keybindings (the GUI is also bad, but I think it's bad in a way that's not going to be impossible to fix without screaming from people who like what's already there). It's truly only lacking a decent text editor. This isn't to say that the keybindings never made sense; in the stage of computing before X, where Space Cadet-like keyboards were common, it was more than fi…

If that were the case, vim would not be as popular as it is.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#57

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 Scriv…

Perhaps adding JavaScript to the list of languages that you can extend Emacs with would be a good start - https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryExtensionLanguage

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#58

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?

Genuine question: what's different about SLIME/CIDER than any IDE? Auto-completion, documentation lookup, REPL, code reloading, unit test integration... these are all in Xcode, IntelliJ, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc depending on language support.

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#59
A shame Stallman put the kibosh on QT quickly. Is he planning on there being a GPLv4? Not in the "leaving that option open for the future" kind of planning, but more, "A need has been identified that can't be met by v3, it's time to start working on v4." Because if they truly want a cross platform visual interface, AFAICT, QT is the closest you're going to get, and IMO, is the best means of doing so. Every QT app I've seen has looked and acted a lot closer to a native app on Windows and Mac than anything that ever came out of GTK or other GUI toolkits. And I don't understand why GTK doesn't have the same issues. It's not a GNU project AFAIK. It can't be a GPL vs LGPL thing, because QT is also available under LGPL. Is Stallman perhaps just stuck on the fact that QT was once not available under a free license?

Re: Making Emacs Popular Again

#60

Honestly the hardest part about emacs for me has always been documentation. Like how do I build a plugin. What function do I call to set a custom key binding? This stuff has always been so hard to find despite it being so important to the underlying experience. Now that I've used it for a while I know these things, but they didn't come easily.

These days you can just google to get answers quickly, just like for any other tool. Stackoverflow, etc. has tons of content for emacs too.
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