Emacs should have a webpage demonstrating useful features and packages

Emacs has lots of features and lots of packages written for it. There should be a webpage demonstrating such features and packages with a short description and instantly viewable video demos, so browsing users could instantly see how a feature works without installing anything. Such a page could be a great way to demonstrate Emacs' capabilites. VSCode has such a page, here it is: https://vscodecandothat.com Instead of youtube videos animated gifs can work too like in this page which demonstrates Helm's capabilities with text and animgifs: https://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html There is this list, but it's only text: https://github.com/emacs-tw/awesome-emacs Having animgif demos is important, because then the user can instantly see the value of a feature without installing and configuring it first. Such a page could be shown to new users, so they can browse it and find useful packages which they may not find otherwise for a long time. The community could create a page like this by people contributing animgifs demoing their favorite features and collecting these on a webpage.

So why don't you write one. Post the link when it's ready.

Feel free to contribute to http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/index.html.

Because it's a big job, there are tons of emacs features. It should be a community effort. The question is what form should this take? E.g. a page on Emacswiki which collects these feature gifs where everyone can contribute? Or is there some better way?

Is there a description on that page of how people can contribute?

Also, it's more like a manual, describing features and keybindings, etc.. I envision something like the https://vscodecandothat.com page which shows only a short description and a video demo with a link which the user can click if he wants to find out more.

AFAIK you just have to send your patches to emacs-devel. You can find the source here: http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/emacs/emacs/tour/

https://emacs.sexy/

People, not very smart ones, might adopt Ginsu knives via such video brochures ([for those old and American enough](https://youtu.be/6wzULnlHr8w)). They don't pick up text editors that way, which are first driven by whatever their university peers are using, then potentially switched by their first job. At no point are they influenced by vscodecandothat.com. I personally chose emacs in the 90s because among my limited choices, only emacs could do font coloring. I wasn't any different than the young emacsers today preoccupied with the visuals of theming and scroll widgets. The field has obviously broadened since: a prospect would have to be an old soul indeed, one with a strong UNIX background, to throw in with emacs over the much better looking, much less stultifying alternatives.

https://emacsrocks.com

I guess you can put me under, "not very smart people" cause I picked up atom because of video, then switched to vim because of a video and now I'm on spacemacs because of a video.

I think it's a step in the right direction but still it's a lot of tell and very little show.

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I think the best option is to create a sexy web page with some system that accepts contributions of everyone. So if you have some nice thing of emacs to show you can publish there. It could have some voting system, so the nicest ones would be ordered at the top, and maybe some moderation to avoid duplicated stuff and trolling. I'm very busy with work and personal stuff but I'll put it on my to do list. I think this is very nice idea.

If someone makes the website I would be willing to contribute personally. I don't have the knowledge to manage this myself however. If you set up the infrastructure for this and make a post announcing it I bet people will contribute to it and there will be around 100 packages in the first days if not more.

Solipsism … have you (specifically, you) heard of it? Other folks might have different experiences, you know?

It's very easy to pontificate about what might ought to be. It's harder to realize it. "The community" can only do so much.

The community can come up with a way to realize this. I'm not a web designer, so I can't design a sexy webpage, but I can contribute animgifs of features, of course. This topic is about discussing the idea and hopefully someone comes around who's well versed in creating pretty webpages.

It has the video portion, but missing the descriptive summary portion. E.g. what is ""Mind. Exploded." ? The https://vscodecandothat.com way is more userfriendly, as it summarizes the feature shortly, provides an instant video description and a link to find more about the feature.

> what is ""Mind. Exploded."? Something that exploded your mind. 🤯 edit: added pictorial representation.

My first reaction is that I really dislike the framing of *oughts and shoulds of other people time*.

I'm not a native English speaker, so it's possible I didn't express myself properly. By 'should have' I wanted say 'it could be great for emacs'. And it's certanly not only about other people's time, because I will contribute animgifs as well, of course, but it's a big task, so it must be a community effort.

Thank you for the context and I agree it would be great for Emacs!

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And documentation that doesn't look like 90s html. That'd be a bigger help for new users, imo.

I think it’s actually better that such sites, like https://emacs.rocks, are an individual (or few-person) effort. Features are cool and all, especially features like the ones Emacs has, but features don’t evangelize a product as well as a unified, cohesively-presented aesthetic does. A site full of .gifs that showed different visual configurations, philosophies, layouts, etc. would confuse rather than attract people, and trying to get any sizable count of developers to agree on standard Emacs visuals would be like pulling teeth. In contrast, an individual effort, or a series like the System Crafters videos, can be managed and curated by one person, and in doing so retain a cohesive visual and pedagogical philosophy.

Why not just make a subreddit for it with strict moderation to enforce some sort of consistency with the gif, descriptions, etc.?

See https://emacsdocs.org/

Ah, thank you for showing me that.

I can probably create a foundation for this but the question is: Why?

https://github.com/thomasluquet/emacs-can-do-that

> Because it's a big job, there are tons of emacs features. Do you know how to eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

The same reason other tools have this: to make emacs more popular. But of course, if you don't care about this then it may not be reason enough for you.

Why isn't this CSS the official one? If someone made a better looking html then it should be the default. DId the author submit it for inclusion?

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Nice. Thanks for sharing

Very nice. Thanks for sharing

https://emacs.rocks didn't work, but <https://emacsrocks.com/> did

This has been removed, as it is not very civil; please attack ideas, not people.

For people as confused as I was by the vscodecandothat page OP mentions: the videos do eventually appear on the page, you just have to wait 30–45 seconds.

I guess they want make sure it works across as many browser as possible. Not just browser like IE 5, IE 6, but also terminal like browsers etc… You may not know about but nowadays many Emacs packages provide screenshots or gifs, specially the one hosted on GitHub.

> The original Emacs was written by St. iGNUcius himself — Richard Stallman. Didn’t emacs exist before RMS got involved?

Nice! Knew about ~~compare-file~~ `compare-windows` but not `ediff` … looks useful! Bookmarked to peruse later… **edit** It's actually `compare-windows` I was thinking of ... it lets you compare different parts of the same buffer ... ediff doesn't really support that AFAICT, but looking forward to try it for diffing different files ... **edit 2** `ediff-current-file` does what I want!

RMS added macros to the TECO editor (written by someone else) and made some other changes such as editing entire files at a time. Various people wrote macros, and Guy Steele compiled them into emacs. So it's a collaborative project. There was then a bunch of various emacs-like editors with extra features, and RMS wrote the first version of GNU Emacs so that there could be a libre Emacs. (I also kind of dislike the veneration of RMS that calling him "Saint IGNUcius" involves.)

Making it work in the terminal at the cost of significantly sacrificing this much usability would be a pretty bad design tradeoff.

It's sad that you get downvoted for answering the question you were asked.

I don't really understand the downvotes either.

I'd put the following feature on the list to blow VSCode users minds: make-frame /s