Modern Emacs: Redux

Looking forward to everyone doubling down on their opinions here.

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I totally agree with the first comment! I'm was a vim user, that started using emacs due to doom. Now I have my own config, and it feels great! I believe that whatever the devs are doing is great. All of my problems with vim are actually solved by emacs! I really like that most people in the community actually recommend doom, whereas in the vim/neovim community everyone discourages the use of a framework, which leads to a poor experience.

>Agreement (mostly from experienced Emacs users) > >Partial agreement (mostly from experienced Emacs users) > >Strong disagreement (mostly from people who (I guess) don’t use Emacs) This kinda sums it up though does it not? The question here would be, if that 3rd group are people who don't use Emacs and never have or people who don't use Emacs because they tried it and had issues with it. Issues that are discussed in this ongoing argument about Emacs out of the box for a new user. It is not surprising that experienced emacs users don't see an issue there. I have a lot of respect for the author and his work/contributions to emacs. Prelude was and is a great config or distro to show what Emcas can be capable of or his work on Projectile or Clojure's CIDER. But I wholeheartedly disagree with the general dismissive attitude towards negative experiences of new users with a default emacs. Emacs by default is pretty unintuitive , no matter what fancy explanation people like to use to explain that away. It is a tool one really has to want to use and where many seemingly simple things can and often are a lot more complex and involved to solve. And I don't what would be so bad if some of these things would be addressed. I do agree however with one thing, Emacs together with Vim, in the face of the demise of Atom have proven once again that learning one or the other may just be the way to go.

I missed the original post so I went back to read it. > Given that most of those proposals are somewhat superficial I’m skeptical that any of them would move the needle for Emacs’s adoption. If you ask me - there’s pretty much nothing we can do that would suddenly make Emacs as popular as VS Code. Why is this a goal? Why do we need to proselytize Emacs as one true editor? To me it sounds like the "year of linux on desktop" which happened a dozen years ago, depending on who you ask. Linux is perfectly viable on the desktop, and Emacs is a wildly productive tool for me. The only competing app might the browser for me. So what's the rallying cries? At this point, I think it's evolution, rather than revolution.

I would add the following to your take: there is a framing here that really seems disingenuous. “The people who disagree with me must just not use emacs” is kind of a silly take when the first disagreement comes from a self-admitted grey beard.

Agreed.

I'm sorry if my attempt for a summary sounds this way to you, as I definitely didn't mean it in this manner. My point was mostly that different groups of users value different things (which is not exactly surprising). And it's also kind of hard to make everyone happy at the same time. :-)

Out of curiosity - which were the problems you had with vim that were addressed by Emacs? I haven't used vim in over 15 years, so I'm genuinely curious what's the allure of Emacs for vim users these days.

I appreciate the clarification. I think you’re coming from good intentions here and I’m not trying to disparage you personally, I just disagree with you on this. I have never been able to follow the logic on this topic, it seems silly to me. The emacs out of the box experience is lousy, so much so that great packages like prelude are a commonly accepted necessity. If we agree on this as a community, and we’re all running our own highly customized configs to make emacs usable, why not admit that we probably should improve that first experience?

>But I wholeheartedly disagree with the general dismissive attitude towards negative experiences of new users with a default emacs. Again, I don't argue that things can be improved here - I'm just saying that "intuitiveness" in subjective and it's unrelated to the concept of "modernity", at least for me. "intuitive" is also not "familiar" and that's the part that really bothers me - a lot of people assume that all applications have to behave more or less the same to be intuitive, and that's not what intuitive means. But I see your point and I don't want to argue. If I sound dismissive on the subject - my bad. I guess with age I become way too philosophical on certain topics. :-)

Thank you for clarifying and I really appreciate your passion and work for emacs.

Well put, this is what I was trying to convey, too.

It seems obvious to me that emacs is already very modern compared to what it was not long ago, the pace of new features is very high considering it's an old, foss project. To me it's even overwhelming.. I already didn't know all corners of emacs, and there are new ones I won't have time to know. I'm all for lean and consolidation. And let people do weird things on the side.

Why i agree that emacs can afford to be different, i also think that, especially the GUI side, can be greatly improved. I have really switched only about 1 year ago ( was an occasional user before). And clearly until you're ready to do some elisp + copying various snippets from the internet, you won't get a satisfying experience even for basic editing. I went on because a colleague of mine pushed me, but a lot of others might not like it. And i find it sad that some amazing developers may never enjoy and contribute to our community because the first impressions are so bad. Almost all these beginner changes are simple customize options. As suggested, not much is needed to have a really decent 1st experience : letting the user choose on the first run between "classic", "mainstream defaults", "mainstream+vim bindings" config file would not need much effort but could greatly improve the beginner experience. On the GUI side, having a dedicated menu with the most often changed settings + leaving the customize full menu in an advanced tab could greatly help without changing emacs much. Even knowing emacs + customize, using the GUI is such a pain

slight anecdote, my colleague uses vscode, and I miss none of what he's doing.. and I appreciate vscode a lot ..

> Emacs by default is pretty unintuitive , no matter what fancy explanation people like to use to explain that away. People say this, but I picked it up organically (with xemacs) because it has menus, and you can guess commands for M-x, and try with apropos. I never found the learning curve that brutal. I used it for like 2 years before someone else gave me their .emacs

I think I agree with the author when he says that chasing this kind of "modernity" is not the answer. For those coming from other popular editors like VS Code (or the dearly departed Atom), Emacs (or even neo?vim) will be weird, and will require some time using it until it makes sense. I think Protesilaos said better when he said that "you can't be an Emacs tourist". And maybe it's supposed to be that way, maybe that's an incentive to users trying to understand how Emacs is still a thing after so many years, learning it, developing packages, etc. As an ex-Emacs tourist, and relatively new Emacs user, I don't expect feature parity with VS Code. I think that Emacs (with its packages) already gives so much that it's hard to ask for more. Sometimes I think some things could be default, like something that shows the possible commands after a key-chord, or a vertical interface to `M-x` with fuzzy searching, or even a `rename-file-and-buffer` command built-in - but I know every new feature is more work and maintenance for the developers. Thankfully there are packages to help with these things (thanks /u/bozhidarb for ivy, counsel, swiper, and crux), and they are easy to install from Emacs itself.

> I definitely felt that many people completely missed the message I was trying to convey in the original article. Many readers started to dissect the random examples of “points of modernization” that I had listed, or argued that Emacs has to be more newcomer-friendly, which for me is something completely orthogonal to Emacs being “modern”. I still have to find an editor with a better built-in tutorial for newcomers (C-h t) or better built-in documentation (C-h r). ***They are great, but they still require people to go through them and learn something new and it seems for many people that’s a very tall order.*** [ Emphasis mine ] This is honestly the root of it. People hate having to learn new things, regardless of if something being new and different means it might be better and improved. An example that I've personally experienced is the Steam Controller. The Steam Controller is arguably the best way to play games on PC because it was designed in such a way that it addressed the failing that the typical gamepad designs have when playing PC games. But *because* it was so different to accommodate this, it fell flat on its face because the majority of the PC gaming crowd simply did not want to have to relearn how to use a controller. As such, despite being a theoretically better option, it failed because it was alien. You see it in competitive video games where there's a rebalance or game patch and suddenly the universe of the game works subtly differently and instead of adapt to the new changes, people just prefer to complain. You see this exact thing play out continuously when you see people say "I don't like GIMP because it's not laid out the same way as Photoshop" or any other scenario where people refuse to use the F/OSS alternatives because it's not literally a 1:1 clone of the program it's replacing. You see it in those stories where <xyz> application had a redesign and then suddenly you hear about all those folks that can't cope because it looks and behaves *slightly different*. There are *so* many examples of this you can find out in the wild, without having to look all that hard, across the entire spectrum of tasks, hobbies, jobs, etc. People in general just *loathe* the up-front cost and experience of learning new things.

[The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it’s all learned.](https://quotesondesign.com/bruce-ediger/) I interpret that as "intuitive" being mostly useless for describing user interfaces. "Discoverable" is fairly definable, but "intuitive" usually just comes down to preference.

One could have a preference for a more nipply UI...

I've been using emacs for so long that I can't really remember what my learning curve was like in great detail, but I seem to recall something like "Whoa! This is really different to what I'm used to; I'd better do some reading", and then thinking it wasn't that hard, and that the extra power was worth the extra effort put into learning. The only thing that would make a big difference to me in terms of making it "modern" would be multi-threading. AFAICT that's not going to happen; or if so, not any time soon. So, steady as she goes, friends. Still loving it, and pretty much zero pain points, compared to much (much!) "modern" software. The old saying about form vs. function is apropos.

Maybe it's just a me problem, but I couldn't get productive in vim as much as I was in eclipse. Since there are no good frameworks that are recommended by the community, I really couldn't understand what neovim could do. Other than the modal editing, to me there's nothing that neovim/vim does something spectacularly well. Emacs has a superb package repo, with some really good power plugins like org mode and magit. It has tons of inbuilt plugins that make sense, and you can see what plugins you can use which make your developement experience superior to other text editors. For example, imenu, eldoc and project.el are really good plugins, but I don't think there's an equivalent in vim. But i believe that the most important part of any configurable text editor is a good framework that shows you what it is capable of, so you can quickly get started, and be blown away! Doom is the sole reason why I switched to emacs, and I might have not if no such good configuration existed.