Making Emacs Popular Again

I currently use Emacs (with Vim keybindings) as my main editor, after oscillating between Emacs and Vim for quite a while. I think the biggest disadvantage Emacs has compared to Vim is its out-of-the-box experience. For me at least, I would say that learning to love Emacs takes a lot of effort, far more than it should. I think folks tend to mentally categorize Vim in the same basket, but I think Emacs is far, far worse at onboarding its users.

The Vim out-of-the-box experience is not exactly great (crucial features like vim-surround have to be installed as a plugin, for instance, in the terminal version there's a lot of delay on some commands, etc). But while learning the unfamiliar keybindings initially takes effort, the huge speed advantage of modal editing becomes apparent after just a few days of sticking with it, and it becomes second nature surprisingly fast, to the point where you just stop considering editors which don't have decent Vim emulation. So while I wouldn't exactly describe Vim as accessible, it gets its core idea across fairly quickly.

By comparison (and also in absolute terms), the Emacs out-of-the-box experience is horribly bad, it seems to make no effort to wow its first time users. It stubbornly sticks to a keybindings scheme that is unfamiliar to a modern audience and which, crucially, unlike Vim's keybindings offers no substantial productivity boost. All the documentation even still calls the Alt key "Meta". So you spend multiple days getting used to Emacs' keybindings scheme, only to end up roughly where you started (not much faster than before). At this point it's easy to start feeling like learning Emacs is not worth it: you've just spent days learning without your productivity increasing, and you just have to take people's word for it that, no, really, it'll get better. The main selling point of Emacs is its extendability. But this point is lost on users who aren't already convinced that they love and want to use your editor. You have to provide a good out-of-the-box experience still.

I agree that a lot of things are weird and could be modernized.

That said, as someone who very slowly got into Emacs and now am full on into it, all this weirdness slowly became more of a an, oh this actually makes a lot of sense, and, you know what, I might like it better.

I still find it weird for a frame to be a window and a window a frame. But logically, I think the Emacs names make more sense. The thing with a frame is a frame, and the sections within it are the windows. I wouldn't mind if it was renamed frame to window and window to panes tough.

Similarly, C-c and M-m used to confuse me a lot. But now I find them way nicer, why have to type all of Ctrl and alt. Also on Mac alt is called command, so having a Meta as a more generic name for the key kind of works.

Kill was weird to me, until I realized kill and delete both exist, but behave differently. There's a kill-ring, text that is killed go in it, text that is deleted doesn't. When you program extensions this is a very important distinction. You don't want programmatic edits to all go in the kill ring and polute it.

Would it be nicer if the more common user used one, which is kill, be named delete which is more familiar to people maybe.

Like I said, I wouldn't mind someone making a big refactor of it all and renaming everything to be less weird to modern times, but I think as you learn those "weirdness" they stop being weird.

Basically, I mean there's a big difference between a quirk, and just something you're not familiar with. I think Emacs names are mostly unfamiliar.

Emacs also has real quirks though, and I think those are more important to address. Like there's a lot of legacy cruft, having to still support working on defunct terminals, and all kind of stuff. Like ESC being a weird Meta key because of terminals that don't support meta. Or the entire UX which is crap by default.

Oh I see. Ya fair. Though honestly even in Jupyter notebooks I don't often see many people making use of anything more then static renders.

That is not the same as it doesn't work with Elisp, and hardly brings any value from Emacs itself.

Agreed. Emacs and Vim basically try to do the same thing with two very different approaches, and both can fit well depending on the use-case. I also get why many prefer VS Code, because spending hours to learn and configure a program just for text editing is not universally appealing. But other people just want that configurability.

> Evil has existed for a long time but vim is still more popular.

Because the behaviour isn't identical(it even has default settings that intentionally deviate!), because it isn't complete(it doesn't affect any other mode), but most importantly for me because Emacs cannot fully match Vim's keybinding functionality. I broke my Emacs configuration a dozen times before realising that.

I am glad I tried out Emacs as a Vim user though, it led to a couple improvements of my Vim configuration and I learned a couple new things.