Making Emacs Popular Again

> a certain intellectual curiosity-satisfaction

User interface design (UID) and user experience (UX) are interesting topics.

Have you ever conducted an oil change at your car or some other minor mechanical task? Wasn't it fun for a moment (at least that one time)?

Machines are interesting.

In the Emacs manual, read the "Saving Emacs Sessions" chapter (or get there from the 'desktop-save-mode' function documentation). Emacs can save and restore your current session, with opened files and windows layout, and as usual it's highly configurable.

By default it uses a global session context, but for example I configure mine to save the session locally in the directory where emacs is started. Then I can have several projects in parallel, and when I start emacs in the project top level directory it restores the session for this specific project. I also make the session saving file name machine specific, and ignored by unison for file synchronization. So the layout is specific for each machines with possible different screen setup leading to different window organizations. Just an example, you can tune it to fit your own needs --- that's the whole point of Emacs to me.

I've had Emacs open in my screen while I'm working for twenty mutter mutter years, and my keybindings have diverged enough where I can't use stock Emacs without stopping and carefully thinking about what I'm doing.

But that's sunk cost. I discourage young programmers from diving into it, for a couple of reasons. First, early in their career there are places where they will get a lot more leverage. Spend some time learning your text editor, sure, but at the five to ten hour mark that rabbit hole starts yielding swiftly diminishing returns. And second, everyone talks about shaping it to your workflow, but, in the end, Emacs is a terrible environment for writing UIs. Not everything is best interacted with as text in a terminal. In fact, most data is not. Compare org-mode with the best of breed todo apps like OmniFocus and Tasks. I use org-mode for my technical diary, and I use OmniFocus for my tasks. OmniFocus is simply better. GUIs with a mouse are a more efficient way to navigate most tasks on a computer that aren't programming.

Stallman mentioned preparing text for publishing. I'm probably unusual in that I have both typeset professionally (back in Quark XPress days) and gone really deep in to LaTeX (in my physics days). I've written and typeset two books. The technical text I did in LaTeX. Actually, I wrote the text in a mix of Scrivener and LyX, and then used Emacs for the final document. For what lies nicely in LaTeX, that's great. The other one I did in Adobe InDesign, and doing it in LaTeX in a text editor instead sounds like masochism. If you're willing to accept what LaTeX gives you, it's fabulous. If not, typesetting with Emacs and LaTeX is a simply inferior experience to using a proper typesetting program.

> As for me, well, when Spacemacs moves the LSP layer to its non-development branch, I'll probably give it a try again

You're doing yourself a discervice for not just using Spacemacs develop branch. It's actually more stable than the master branch.

Please. Emacs will never be popular. Emacs does not need to be popular. Making it popular will require dumbing it down to the level of VS Code. It's doing just fine as it is, please leave it alone.

Edit: I mean, it's a complex, sophisticated, hard-to-master instrument, kind of like Organ. If you feel that popularity of your instrument matters above all (which is perfectly fine) -- just get yourself a Kazoo.