[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.