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Here's a new user perspective on Emacs (based on memory; I actually have more experience than this): 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…
I don’t know. I read the whole article and it seems the suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more “modern” by defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And the author of the article would like the development process to be more “modern.” Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if not the most successful. It…
You don’t even need to fork it. Just have write a .emacs file that new users can copy to their home directory that sets all of that stuff up.
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As an Emacs newbie (less than one year of usage) I could not disagree more. I disagree with basically everything you just said. If somebody wants notepad++, they should just use that instead of trying to turn Emacs into something it never was. As an olive branch: Perhaps Emacs could prompt the user on first run what sort of control scheme they want. Emacs standard, Evil mode, or some notepad clone could be modes that…
> But by the same token, Vim is arcane compared to Notepad style editors but is quite popular, so I outright reject the hypothesis that Emacs has lower numbers because it's arcane vim might be arcane compared to Notepad, but I've been successfully using vim as an editor of choice in ssh pretty much throughout the whole uni without knowing more than :w and :q (at which point it basically was a notepad). I was ever com…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What can you not do with a grid of characters exactly?
Here's what I see as an outsider if I'm a Windows users and want to give this great emacs editor I've heard so much about a try:
First off, I search for emacs, I land on a page with a Windows link. I click that link, I get a rant about how Windows is evil.
Ok, fine, sure, gnu and all of that.
Then I follow a link to download it from a mirror. That link doesn't actually lead to a download, it leads to a directory on the mirror that I need to drill down into another directory. The README in this directory contradicts the emacs website on which version I download. I go to download the installer, if I try to run it, I get a big scary warning (I can't blame GNU on this too much, but still, more friction). Finally, I have emacs on my machine. (If I follow the directions on the webpage, I download a zip file, and I'm left wondering why I should run "runemacs.exe" and not run "emacs.exe". I know why, but dang it, this is just silly)
I run it. I'm presented with some combination of a text UI and iconography from the 90's. I get emacs doesn't change much, but this adds to the sour taste already building.
And then there's the intro, which is what this article is touching on. The first thing it teaches me is some odd-for-me commands to navigate that as a user are all new and unlike every editor I've used.
Now I decide to play around and open a file. Do I want to "visit new file" or "open file"? I pick one, and it helpfully defaults to showing me files in the emacs installation folder. Great.
And by this point the thing has beeped at me a dozen or so times for reasons known only to emacs, and I'm tired of it all.
Emacs is clearly designed for people that use emacs, and that's fine, but if you want to get more mindshare, you'll need to, first thing, ask me if I want to set it up to act like VS Code or IntelliJ or Emacs.
It wasn't until I learned about spacemacs that I gave emacs another try and I haven't gone back since.
SpaceEmacs is closer to such a refined product, though it's aimed at Vim users (with the 'evil' Vim-support package being front and foremost). I am not currently aware of a kind of "best-of-emacs" distribution that focuses on putting Emacs' strengths in their best light (likely at the cost of dropping some UI backwards-compatibility).
As an aside, the article [1] by Dan Coliascione (@quotemstr) from a few years ago about the effort required to work with Emacs' compatibility layers is insightful and hilarious. "GNU Emacs is an old-school C program emulating a 1980s Symbolics Lisp Machine emulating an old-fashioned Motif-style Xt toolkit emulating a 1970s text terminal emulating a 1960s teletype."
I honestly don't expect vanilla GNU Emacs to modernize its UI, because of its incredible legacy baggage. But I do look forward to new "distributions" that do so!
https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smo...
Edit: OK maybe xemacs is no longer actively developed, but sxemacs then.
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The point isn't to reduce the contrast, it's to use contrast based on hue and less on value . Accessibility is the real concern. Solarized fails many of the checks for accessible text under standards such as WCAG 2.0.
> The point isn't to reduce the contrast, it's to use contrast based on hue instead of value. It's not one or the other. It's both: > Solarized reduces brightness contrast but, unlike many low contrast colorschemes, retains contrasting hues
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.
If only there were projects that repackaged Emacs together with packages which adapt the program for people who prefer other keybindings. And failing that, maybe Emacs should include some facility for remapping key bindings?