[Myrmornis]

You can make it look modern: get rid of all menus and bars so that there is nothing on screen except for the text you're editing. (e.g. search for minimal.el) It looks indistinguishable from any other modern editor / IDE in zen mode. Menus and bars are not necessary in these sorts of applications if you use then daily -- more efficient and powerful to use the command palette and key bindings.

[ffaser5gxlsll]

Second this. The "ui" is perhaps useful when learning to use emacs, but every emacs user I've seen after a while has all of it disabled.

I've been using emacs with the "lucid" build since forever, as it's the leanest build that still gets a graphical window working on X11 and see none of the actual "toolkit".

I guess the pgtk build is required nowdays for native wayland support.

[iLemming]

Yup, just the other day I was talking about it on subreddit, will repeat here verbatim:

My comment is an honest reflection of long-time Emacs usage. When I started, years ago, I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that there were no tabs for every file anymore - the concept that was seemingly ingrained into my programmer's brain - almost in every IDE/editor I used before Emacs, I had tabs and a navigational panel on the side. I complained and demanded my tabs, asked on forums and called it "bullshit", when people calmly told me that I truly don't need them. Later I realized - they were right.

Slowly I learned that the wise choice is to remove any distractions - you don't need a minimap, side-panels, complicated modelines, and even line-numbers shown all the time. All that can be activated purposefully, on demand and then toggled off again. These "visual clues" are in fact not so much even distractions but micro-bombardments of your brain neurons - you think they are helping, while in fact they are slowly eating up your neural capacity, to the point that the brain just stops even paying attention to them and they become almost useless waste of your screen estate.

I'm not saying that this all generally true for every case and every user - some prefer certain ways, and it's great that we have a system that is able to satisfy any whim, but it's worth sometimes questioning yourself - am I enslaved by my own mental habits?

[koiueo]

> nothing on screen except for the text you're editing

Just wanted to clarify, to me that's timeless. Modern would be having modern menus, pop-up configuration screen et al.. All the candy that appeals to a less experienced user, who worked with Idea, Sublime of VS code before.

[skydhash]

There's a reason there's no beginner car, no beginner guitar, and no beginner drill. Those are either tools or toys. If all you want is to type some text, notepad (or the equivalent in other OS) is enough. But programmers do more with text. So they should know what tools provide those and how to use those tools. But then you'll find a lot of programmers barely go one level up from notepad with their tools.

[Myrmornis]

I guess I'm not really sure that menus are modern. But anyway I hate the stubbornness over the vanilla emacs UI. The nonsense in the menus and the stupid pixelated pictures of scissors or whatever.

But I've never really got the idea of why emacs should appeal to less experienced users. I think that's misguided: the entire point of Emacs is that you write some emacs lisp. If you're not interested in writing any lisp, then you definitely shouldn't bother with emacs (I used emacs intensively for 20 years and am the author of Emacs packages). And if you're less experienced and looking for Idea/Sublime experience then at this point in your life there's a good chance you aren't interested in writing lisp.