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by simias
2760 days ago
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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. |
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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...