[xfer]

> I'm advocating for improving the out-of-the-box usability story so that the editor isn't putting people off before they get a chance to understand and experience its power.

There are atleast a couple of projects like spacemacs and doom-emacs that already do that. The problem with the point you are making is someone has to do that hard work and also need to market it to the beginners. There isn't any money to make Emacs friendly to beginners. So i doubt it's ever going to be better than it already is through collaborative efforts of people with different goals.

[jolux]

>There are atleast a couple of projects like spacemacs and doom-emacs that already do that.

Both of which are not really true to the core Emacs philosophy in several ways though. And thus, they add a whole new layer to have to debug when something breaks.

>So i doubt it's ever going to be better than it already is through collaborative efforts of people with different goals.

But there are plenty of open source projects that succeed at usability despite having different people working on different goals. The question is whether we want Emacs to be the best text editor for everyone, or the best text editor for an elite few.

>The problem with the point you are making is someone has to do that hard work and also need to market it to the beginners. There isn't any money to make Emacs friendly to beginners. So i doubt it's ever going to be better than it already is through collaborative efforts of people with different goals.

Of course someone has to do this work, but how hard did Microsoft market VSCode? VSCode's rise has been fueled by word of mouth and strong first-party support for popular tooling. "Marketing" in this case is overstated. You need a product good enough to sell first.

I'm not at all denying this would be a lot of work, but I think it's worthwhile. If you think it's a problem that work is not being done in this area then we don't disagree.

[oblio]

> The question is whether we want Emacs to be the best text editor for everyone, or the best text editor for an elite few.

I can answer that for you. Emacs definitely wants B). They might pay some lip service to A), but as usual, keep your eye on what people do, not on what they say.

To offer a comparison point, Neovim. Neovim is also an Open Source project, but it wants to make Vim more powerful <<and>> more user friendly. So they've removed obscure stuff, made the default configuration newbie friendly, etc.

Emacs is too afraid of this. It has a ton of long term users that just don't want their defaults changed. There's a reason this XKCD is about Emacs: https://xkcd.com/1172/

I think Emacs will change over the following decades. Not because its users will <<change>>, but because its <<users>> will change. To clarify, it's like that saying about science: science advances, one funeral at a time.

[hvis]

> It has a ton of long term users that just don't want their defaults changed.

For all we know, there might be just a dozen of them, but with the (low) popularity of the mailing lists, they are certainly making themselves heard.

> I think Emacs will change over the following decades. Not because its users will <<change>>, but because its <<users>> will change. To clarify, it's like that saying about science: science advances, one funeral at a time.

Right. Hopefully it won't alienate the newer generations of users too much by that time.