[liability]

As an Emacs newbie (less than one year of usage) I could not disagree more. I disagree with basically everything you just said. If somebody wants notepad++, they should just use that instead of trying to turn Emacs into something it never was.

As an olive branch: Perhaps Emacs could prompt the user on first run what sort of control scheme they want. Emacs standard, Evil mode, or some notepad clone could be modes that ship with Emacs by default (evil already does.)

(I chose evil, because I came from vim. Maybe this is why Emacs was so easy for me to pick up. But by the same token, Vim is arcane compared to Notepad style editors but is quite popular, so I outright reject the hypothesis that Emacs has lower numbers because it's arcane. Rather, I think it has a marketting ''problem'' relative to Vim.)

[kzemek]

> But by the same token, Vim is arcane compared to Notepad style editors but is quite popular, so I outright reject the hypothesis that Emacs has lower numbers because it's arcane

vim might be arcane compared to Notepad, but I've been successfully using vim as an editor of choice in ssh pretty much throughout the whole uni without knowing more than :w and :q (at which point it basically was a notepad). I was ever completely lost in Emacs though, with its nested C-x, M-x seemingly without rhyme or reason. I wouldn't "outright" reject that hypothesis without more scrutiny.

Anecdotally, I've been an Emacs (Spacemacs) user for a few years after that, and I never got used to all the commands I would use on a daily - but not hourly - basis, having to always look those up. But, as one of the other top-level posts said, what made me switch in the end were the language servers.

[liability]

Vim drops noobs straight into normal mode, meaning the moment they start trying to type they get confused. I know that's what happened to me. The arcane nature of Emacs doesn't make itself apparent nearly so fast.

[JdeBP]

Only if it isn't invoked as "evim", "eview", "vim -y", or "view -y".

[liability]

True, though a noob wouldn't know how to invoke it like that.

[mplanchard]

Yeah honestly I think a config “wizard” when you start up to get some basic standard stuff ready to go, like package installs, themes, evil/CUA/traditional keybindings, LSP stuff, some major modes, etc. would go a long way towards making it less intimidating and more productive out of the gate.

Also some kind of popup help for keybindings like you get with the Doom/Spacemacs leader key would I think help a lot.

I certainly don’t think that changing the color scheme or other “chrome” improvements are going to make any meaningful difference, and honestly the discussion in the article sounded kind of condescending, assuming that the only reason people might find emacs difficult to get started with is because it doesn’t have cat videos or a dark color scheme.