Making Emacs Popular Again

I'be been using Emacs for 17 years mostly for programming-related tasks. My opinions are:

- Emacs is an editor for people who think that learning some Lisp sounds fun if they don't know some already.

- Emacs should not bother trying to appeal to a more general audience; it's not an editor for most people when new to programming, and it's an editor for a very small minority of non-programmers.

- Emacs should focus on its strengths: it is the most powerful and extensible editor ever created. As long as it looks after that identity, it will always be highly respected.

- The infinite customizability via emacs lisp and the ecosystem of libraries is the only thing that can make Emacs more attractive than other editors.

- Emacs should be sleek, minimal, fast, and visually beautiful, by default.

- The customize interface is ugly and not a priority; it should be expected that Emacs users will configure things in Emacs Lisp.

- The clunky default icons and splash screen should be got rid of: present a blank screen with minimal tooling if a beautiful first impression cannot be created.

- Many of the elisp packages that ship with Emacs should be removed from the core, with users installing them as packages (Org-mode, Gnus, etc), leaving a more easily maintainable core.

vim sucks too but its ubiquitous from smallest container build to IoT device.

I would like to understand why vim does not seem to have this problem? I guess as stated below, it's just they way it is marketed. Because the way I see it, emacs is much easier to start out with than vim.

If I start emacs, I can navigate around the text with the arrow keys, the way I would expect from most other text entry systems. Then I can just type stuff. I can click at points in the text to navigate there, just like in notepad or anywhere else.

OTOH in vim it is nothing like that. Nothing is even remotely familiar. Yet there are much more vim users than emacs users. So I don't buy it that the learning curve is the problem.

I'm not an Emacs user, but with all kinds of software like this, I find that the strengths lie not in what makes it popular but what makes it lasting. If too much is changed in Emacs, scores of users will cry havoc and switch to XEmacs (or something) and it will become even less popular.

Emacs has a stable core user base and as far as I can tell, it's recently getting some traction among a new generation who are exactly the kind of users that would likely jump ship as soon as a lot of "modernization" started happening. If they wanted something "modern", they wouldn't opt for Emacs in the first place. It's not like there's a lack of choice: IDE:s and editors adhering to current trends and concepts within UI/UX design are plentiful. They have sought out Emacs because it is uniquely Emacs and not yet another Sublime/VS Code/Atom.

Editors aren't exactly comparable to desktop environments, but when Gnome 3 was conceived for similar reasons of following design trends and thinking afresh, we suddenly also had Cinnamon, MATE and Budgie instead of just KDE and Gnome. Not that I mind diversity, but it's a fine example of alienating a user base. Now, consider how conservative an Emacs user of today probably is.

I find that one of the few things I still truly enjoy about computers is that there is stubborn software left for stubborn people to use. Slackware, Emacs, fvwm, xterm... Familiarity, not innovation. That's worth something, too.

To be clear, by "your editor", I don't mean emacs—I mean the person who works at a publisher: she knows that a gnu is just a wildebeest and inheritance bequeathal of wealth; assumes "C-c ;" is just an obscure emoji; and will not waste her time indulging a writer who uses an obscure [1], roundabout way of entering text into M$ Word.

Look, again, you're preaching to the choir—I use emacs every day. But writing a Python script to generate my org-native ToC to navigate reference materials is just...a very different, more work-intensive beast than an interactive drag-and-drop IDE tailored to the needs of professional writers. Impossible to approximate, with enough determination? No. Possible to start using intuitively within the first 15 minutes? Also: no.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...