[pulisse]

> A small-ish skilled community is enough to keep the project going.

The trends of the last few years are worrisome, though, particularly as regards the pool of developers who can work on Emacs core (the part written in C). Right now there's only one dev who's in a position to do non-trivial work on the display engine, and he also took on primary maintainer responsibilities a couple of years ago. When he burns out, the project is going to stall, hard.

Stefan Monnier, who was maintainer for most of the past decade, perceived this trend very clearly and was vocal in trying to recruit new talent. He didn't get much cooperation from other core devs.

[drieddust]

It feels like Emacs Developers are actively tries to shoo away modernization and people who do not want to put in hours trying to actively learn just Emacs.

At one point I tried using Emacs for everything but it didn't work out for me. Now I still use it but only for tasks management and coding.

Unless you want to spend hours of your time customizing it and then a lot of other person also does the same customization. This just ends up wasting a lot of time overall.

For me Emacs lacks the following and I think others will have the same feeling:

Obscure Terminology Documentation is all geeky with terms like frames, META, kill ring etc. This creates unnecessary friction for a new user. Basics of ELISP can be learned rather quickly but trying to apply it while grokking the tersely written documentation is just discouraging.

Sensible Defaults Simple things CTRL-C, CTRL-V does not work out of the box.

Mobile Interface It is an error not to provide a facility to interface with mobile devices natively. I get full Emacs can be invoked via termux on any Android device. However, it is just unusable and irritating. Orgazly and likes also not very useful.

[simias]

Well the problem is that people caring about Emacs have learned a long time ago what a kill-ring, the point, the cursor and meta mean in the context of Emacs. In its defence, a lot of that predates modern user interface conventions. Changing this lingo would probably make it more approachable for newcomers but it would confuse experienced users. On top of that you can be sure that not all elisp out there will be updated quickly (if ever) and you end up with two different words for the same things in different docs which is not exactly a win for anybody.

Beyond that Emacs's docs are unparalleled in the editor world as far as I know, you can explore pretty much any functionality by calling "describe-key", "describe-mode" etc... Even decades later very few (if any) editor can rival the flexibility and self-documenting nature of Emacs.

Regarding key bindings I agree that it's definitely a pain point for newcommers, it's just too different from the modern standard (while not necessarily being better. C-_ for undo? I got used to it but it's hard to defend). Unfortunately making a complete new set of bindings that would play nice with 3rd party packages is probably very difficult.

[drieddust]

> Well the problem is that people caring about Emacs have learned a long time ago what a kill-ring, the point, the cursor and meta mean in the context of Emacs.

Those people are not going to live forever so if Emacs wants to have fresh blood inducted then a gradual modernization would not hurt. I think even Richard Stallman agrees[1] to some of it.

> Beyond that Emacs's docs are unparalleled in the editor world as far as I know, ....

I agree Emacs have documentation for almost everything but I disagree on the quality of documentation. For example when I pull out a documentation Most of the documentation describes what the argument should be which is anyways clear by looking at the argument list. It would be much better to include an example instead of describing the arguments verbatim.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-01/msg00...