Making Emacs Popular Again

1. Install Emacs

2. Sync existing config via git

3. Work

New employee 4 workflow at company X:

1. Install Emacs

2. Spend 2 hours learning default Emacs

3. Work

New employee 5 workflow at company X:

1. Install Emacs

2. Spend 1 - 2 hours learning default Emacs

3. Spend 2 - 4 hours googling interesting Emacs packages, in each case going to their GitHub repo to read the directions, adding a use package form to your config with the settings that seem best from reading the directions and testing it to see if you like it until you have a useful set of functionality

4. Work

You can probably spend plenty of additional time tweaking emacs to be everything from your mail client, your music player, your IRC client, insert task here but if you do this in the time you would be watching Netflix instead of the time you are supposed to be working you probably wont have trouble getting your work done.

I literally have no idea what you are talking about insofar as TTY settings, themes, indexing bugs highlighting bugs, or constant workarounds. I installed Emacs the graphical application, opted to spend 2 hours reading a book wherein I learned how to use emacs and picked a theme by searching for the string emacs theme and picking one that looked cool. I ran package-install typed the name of the theme, hit enter and evaluated (load-theme 'theme) in my config.

I have no idea why you would be running Emacs in a terminal in the first place.

Expecting people to adapt to 1984 - which, just a reminder folks, is more than 30 years ago - rather than updating your documentation and maybe some keybindings to better reflect today is in fact incredibly fucking user hostile.

> Terminal-based Vim is not like a modern application, yet is more popular than Emacs.

I think what happens here is that when someone decides they want to invest the time to learn an advanced editor, most of that subset of people end up choosing vi. Emacs is not approachable enough to appeal to people who don't fall in that group, and vi has more obvious productivity wins for someone who does enter that group, since its focus is on velocity-of-editing rather than extensibility, the latter of which is not even that unique any more (see VSCode/Atom).

This feature is built in to all JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm, etc.), most popular web wikis (Confluence, Notion, etc.), Google's web Office suite, and Microsoft's web office suite. It's available as a plugin for VS Code.

It's also built in to MacOS (Time Machine), Windows (File History), Dropbox, SpiderOak, and Sync, though some of those require it to be enabled and it doesn't work with keyboard shortcuts.

> The interactive insertion and inspection of unicode characters is also nifty.

When does this come in handy?

I use VSCode often because its "just easier". The extensions are at best (in my opinion) ok approximations to what I can get with emacs. Especially for a language I'm inexperienced with in emacs VSCode is a nice integration layer while I adjust my configuration.

Emacs (and to that point vim) is vastly superior to any offering VSCode has. The problem is you have to be productive. Many nights I labored over my emacs configuration to tailor to my job. I've done this for the last 10 years. It takes effort. To that, you have a point. VSCode is effortless. On that, VScode doesnt feel like anything to me except a bridge layer. Emacs and vim offer a vastly better experience (without the git politics!) if you're willing to spend the time customizing it. But that is the difference - are you willing to spend the time? Many developers are not and that's fine. But for a marginal additional investment you can have something better.

Something to think about at least. I can install my Emacs configuration in 30 seconds from my github.