Toward a “modern” Emacs

Note that I'm referring to Visual Studio, not VS Code.

In my last job, we didn't use any plugins with Visual Studio for a bunch of years before one developer convinced the rest to use Resharper.

> Almost everyone using a text editor is using it for purposes which would definitely be helped by task-specific enhancements (plugins which are typically much easier to get in other editors/IDEs)

I find this statement untethered from reality. I think this gets to the crux of much of this discussion. There seems to be an implicit assumption that Emacs exist for writing code (hence the comparisons with VS Code, etc).

I think if you poll most Emacs users, while programming will definitely have more weight, a lot of people use Emacs for all kinds of things unrelated to programming: TODO management, document authoring, writing emails, etc. Most of my Emacs usage in my first job was simply editing text files, not programming. This is in line with most non-SW engineering jobs: They need text editors, but not plugins. Over 95% of my home usage is non-programming related.

So when you imply almost everyone using a text editor is using it for purposes where they will want to look for plugins, that's simply far from the truth. Until recently, most people who used text editors used Notepad (the default Windows one), and I've never managed to convince a Notepad user to use anything more powerful. Nice plugins would not sway them.

While Emacs is heavily used by some programmers, I do not think it is the aim of Emacs. It is a general purpose text editor, and a platform for writing text oriented apps.

It's probably not hard for someone to do that with Emacs - all the bits and pieces are there. I wouldn't be opposed to this.

> They're both difficult for beginners to get used to, but once you get over the initial learning hump, Vim was always much easier for me to tweak and configure.

At the risk of starting a pointless war, I suspect it may be because Vim just has an order of magnitude fewer features than Emacs does. Many people have wanted Org mode in Vim, and no one has been able to make a good one.

> when it comes to not stomping on one another. Every attempt I've made at getting serious with Emacs has ended in spending hours trying to get two or three extensions I want to use to play nicely with each other

I believe you because this complaint does come up from time to time. I must have been simply lucky that this has been a very rare problem for me. In fact, I often tell people Emacs is great because one can take disparate packages and use them together to get powerful features. To me it exemplifies the UNIX philosophy of combining tools better than most UNIX utilities themselves do. The worst I've encountered is a conflicting keybinding.

> you can do almost anything with it if you learn Emacs Lisp, but it often feels like you must learn Emacs Lisp to do almost anything with it.

I view that as one of the biggest myths. I was a power user for about a decade before I learned to even write a loop in Emacs lisp. The most I knew was setting the value of variables. That's enough to be a power user.

Now that I know Emacs lisp, I don't have a burst of productivity compared to when I was ignorant. I've customized to solve a few annoying problems, but I've not had any moments of "Oh man, I wish I knew how to do this all these years."

I don't encourage Emacs users to learn elisp. If I ranked things they should explore in Emacs, there would be a lot of stuff higher on that list than learning elisp (org-mode, etc).

Get out of the apple cult.

I actually had been working on a config for noobs. Which basically make it feel like Atom. I think having a choice between that or standard when you start Emacs could be a win.

I also agree that the mouse UX should be modernized. It's just bad, I mean, I barely use the mouse, but also the mouse UX is crippled so I don't want to use it.