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Emacs' very-hard-to-fix issue is that it's based on a grid of characters. This means it will never be able to do many nice IDE things.
Emacs will never be a GUI-only editor, it was designed for a terminal and that is still a use case that many people take advantage of. Don't worry though - if you don't like Emacs you can use any of a number of other editors.
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I suppose rms can't understand why anybody would think anything could be better than what he chose to do 40-something years ago.
A lot of things are different without being better. Before ctrl-x/Ctrl-v became the standard for Cut/paste, it was Ctrl-del/Ctrl-insert in many dos and early Windows editors - which makes a lot more mnemonic sense. It’s better to standardize on something, but that something isn’t necessarily better and is often worse.
Keyboard shortcuts will always fall into one of two categories: That makes perfect sense (usually mapping to a mnemonic like C-a for "select all"); That's totally arbitrary (C-y). It makes sense (and cua-mode offers it) to offer the opportunity to rebind the keys to the mainstream arbitrarily selected shortcuts, but it also makes sense to keep what's been used by emacs users for 40 years since that's what they're used to at this point (oh hell, I've been using it for 20 years, time has flown).
I open emacs-gtk. A document is already loaded. I try to type something, and every letter I type gives the unhelpful error message "[letter] is undefined". I guess this means I need to create a new document first. I open the File menu, and see "Visit New File...". "Visit" sounds weird, and the "..." is suspicious, but at least it has "New" in it, so I pick that. It opens a file picker, so "Visit New File..." must be Emacs slang for "Open...", and there is apparently no "New" functionality in the File menu. There's also an "Open File..." menu item too for some mysterious reason, but that's obviously not what I want, so I ignore it.
I check the Help menu. This has 19 (!) top level options, none of which are obviously correct, and one of which is "Emacs Psychotherapist". I click that one out of curiosity. It replaces the starting document without warning and there's no obvious way to get it back. I'm presented with more Emacs slang. I assume "RET" means Enter, and that Psychotherapist must be a Microsoft Clippy clone.
I type "new document", hoping it will search the documentation. I immediately notice the scroll bar flickering. This draws my attention to the incorrect size of the drag handle. I click the empty space below the drag handle, which moves the drag handle but doesn't actually affect the text. I drag the drag handle back up, which makes the text glitch out for a moment, but otherwise does nothing.
I press "RET" twice, and get "Why do you say new document?" I then realize that it's actually an Eliza clone not a Clippy clone, and I've wasted my time. I give up on trying to create a new file, and just Open an existing one. I immediately notice the cursor is an ugly inverse video cursor instead of a normal thin line cursor. I press and hold the down arrow key, and notice that scrolling moves in big jumps instead of line-by-line. It also forcibly moves the cursor. It seems the cursor lives in screen space like it's still the 1970s and I'm using a hardware terminal. There is no obvious way to keep its position in the document while you navigate somewhere else. Despite this, Page Up cannot move the cursor to the beginning of the document like it should. Page Down works though.
I assume that, like every modern text editor, there's a "Find in This Document..." feature bound to Control-F for easy navigation. There's not: Control-F is bound to right arrow. Presumably this made sense 40 years ago. There is not even any Find functionality in the Edit menu, which you'd think would be core functionality for any text editor.
In the course of this experimentation, I notice that merely moving the mouse cursor over the scroll bar is enough to make it flicker. I hold the scroll down button with the mouse. It actually does scroll, but extremely slowly, averaging about one line per second. The timing is inconsistent, and the CPU usage is strangely high.
I type something, and notice that there is no visual indication that the document now contains unsaved changes, such an asterisk in the title bar, or a dot on the Save icon. I press Control-S to save, which doesn't save, and instead triggers the Find function I was looking for. I decide that "Modern Emacs" is a hopeless quest and give up in favor of something written this century.
Yeah definitely ignore all the seasonal requests for the latest fads, and just focus on the last paragraph. I think the post author agrees, hence the sarcastic tone. The fact is Emacs does many neat things but is also a giant steaming pile of sh-- tech debt. I'm sure VSCode will get there too as time passes, but older editors simply have a head start in this regard. Emacs needs it's Neovim (which also contributes bac…
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I am one of those geezers.
Doesn't pass the switch test.
EDIT You created your account two days ago and you're already accusing people of ageism? Get off my lawn.
How about instead the Emacs website and splash screen recommends different `flavours' of Emacs instead? Such as Doom and Prelude for example. No reason to change vanilla Emacs. Stop having Emacs be the recommended way to install and use Emacs.
> There was some discussion of adopting the Solarized color palette in particular. As Dmitry Gutov pointed out, though, Solarized makes for a rather low-contrast experience This is a strange complaint - it's tautological. The whole point of Solarized is to reduce the contrast.[1] It's kind of like saying having a dark background is bad, because it is dark. For people who stare at a computer all day, a lower contrast…
> For people who stare at a computer all day, a lower contrast is good. I stare at a computer all day and I hate low contrast themes, including solarized. I am not claiming my view applies to everyone, so please, could you stop doing that. It is subjective: there is nothing inherently superior about solarized, even for people who stare at screens all day. And it is not just an accessibility issue. It is a subjectivit…
Personally I find that contrast between different themes, that is when switching from say one website to another, is the most eye strain inducing. Going from reading black on white to white on black or vice versa just hurts.
I keep everything black/dark on white themed since that's how most of the world works. I suspect many who use certain themes experience eye strain when viewing normal stuff and falsely assume it proves the efficacy of their theme.
Emacs is in that disastrous stage of a product's life where the geezers destroy their own community by refusing to adapt to new expected behavior, thus driving away the newbies. Eventually the product dwindles to just supporting the few remaining geezers left. I'm not talking about stupid fads such as skinning and color palette changes. But cut-copy-paste keybindings (not to mention select-all, save, close window, un…
> Emacs is in that disastrous stage of a product's life where the geezers destroy their own community by refusing to adapt to new expected behavior It doesn't look like your an Emacs user. As another commenter pointed out (as did the article indirectly), Emacs has more users than ever. It's definitely growing - not dwindling. As an Emacs user, the last decade has shown an immense growth in capabilities via MELPA pack…
It's true that the claim that the Mac/Lisa key chords were the standard 35 years ago is quite wrong. But it's false to claim that there was another standard instead.
After using Emacs for 10+ years, I've switched to VSCode for a really simple reason: fuzzy matching a file in a project. I've tried so many different plugins and hacks to get it to work, but it never did quite work. Searching for a filename either matches the wrong file, or new files that were freshly added are no longer there.