Emacs Docs The modern documentation website Emacs deserves

Emacs Docs The modern documentation website Emacs deserves
emacsdocs.org

It's ancient (Emacs had hypertext way before the Web existed), but, for some purposes, it can be much more efficient than anything in a Web browser.

info (i.e. TexInfo) is great, but back in the 90s, there was a push in the GNU world to move from man pages to info entirely. Annoyingly, during that time lots of GNU man pages would tell you to look at its info pages instead.

Me, and apparently others, were not thrilled. While info is technically superior, the "one page" format of a man page, at least to me, felt quicker and more convenient for quickly looking up something than info's hypertext. info might be better for dedicated reading of documentation (and I like using it in emacs for that), but perceived as less so when you quickly, say, want to look up a flag for ls.

This might be for complicated human reasons or even just habit... e.g. you can still do full text search in info pages across all subpages, both with the "info" command and in emacs' info mode: just hit the 's' key.

I'm not sure what the state today is, I can't remember when I was last pointed to info instead of man (and I think I dimly remember some announcement that this would stop). But I also largely moved more towards BSD derivates rather than Linux, so I can't be sure.

A major part of the problem is that Emacs development is completely captured by the, shall we say, esoteric personality of its original author.

Emacs is a political project first and foremost—this much is clear. The focus is not on making the best possible text editor/programmable environment. In fact several proposed improvements have died on the drafting board because they would e.g. improve the experience of emacs users on OSX or Windows, and we can't have those users having a better UX than the people using emacs on underpowered Lemote netbooks with 10-inch screens running Trisquel without a GUI, now can we?

So, yes, Emacs sacrifices betterment in the name of ethical purity, and that's fine. It's their codebase to do with what they will.

But there is an enormous disconnect, because if emacs is a political project (and it is), then surely its goal must be to convert more people to their cause? To increase the size of their flock?

Of course emacs' original author is also exactly the wrong person you want for that sort of task, because he makes odious and repugnant remarks about all manner of subjects, he harasses women and holds disturbing views about bestiality and pedophilia. This man, who seemingly hasn't the self-awareness to realize his behavior directly hurts the credibility of his cause, is who the FSF apparently wants as the banner man leading their cause, and to whose judgment on many issues the emacs developers defer.

But I believe there is a sizable component of the emacs userbase that likes emacs as an editor but wishes someone would create the canonical/sanctioned fork of emacs that dispenses with all the gross Stallman stuff and focuses on just being a good editor, so that we can have mailing list discussions without worrying about what some gross creepy old man who hasn't written a line of code in 20 years and eats his toenails on live television thinks about per-pixel scrolling.

Anyways, to circle back to the point, I believe it's this latter part of the community that submits things like TFA, because they genuinely believe that emacs (the software) is awesome but in need of some love, but the emacs developers seem uninterested in making emacs more appealing to new users so we end up with websites for documentation instead of new features.

Maybe they are a better experience locally, but I never bothered to find out.

The patological fear that it appeared the info system had of ever producing a webpage with 200kb+ text on it, that I can search for and click links without delay essentially ruined the experience for me. Who cares if the download would take 5 seconds, when I would spend 20 minutes reading through it?