Emacs is in that disastrous stage of a product's life where the geezers destroy their own community by refusing to adapt to new expected behavior, thus driving away the newbies. Eventually the product dwindles to just supporting the few remaining geezers left.
I'm not talking about stupid fads such as skinning and color palette changes. But cut-copy-paste keybindings (not to mention select-all, save, close window, undo, etc.) are not a fad. They have been the standard in everything except for Emacs for over THIRTY FIVE YEARS. They were standard when Ronald Reagan was president.
Pop-up menus on right-button-click have been standard for almost as long, dating to X11 and NeXTSTEP (which is where OS X got them).
And the most awful trend is in preventing clear improvements in modes and functionality from coming to the forefront simply because geezers are not used to them. The argument seems to be that making all these kinds of things standard would be hard on the geezers. This is nonsense. Unlike the newbies, the geezers know how to turn this stuff off.
The geezers prevent this because Emacs is their ecosystem. But for everyone else, Emacs is a small part of a much larger ecosystem (MacOS, Linux, Windows) with which it is increasingly incompatible and archaic. This is myopia pure and simple.
> Emacs is in that disastrous stage of a product's life where the geezers destroy their own community by refusing to adapt to new expected behavior
It doesn't look like your an Emacs user. As another commenter pointed out (as did the article indirectly), Emacs has more users than ever. It's definitely growing - not dwindling. As an Emacs user, the last decade has shown an immense growth in capabilities via MELPA packages. The number of sites with tips on improving Emacs flows has also gone up exponentially.
Not only is it not dying, it's thriving.
> They were standard when Ronald Reagan was president.
For a whole other definition of standard. A lot of the popular DOS applications from Reagan/Bush's time did not use these keybindings. Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins were the norm. Ctrl-C for quitting was the norm.
(I'm not against CUA bindings by default - merely pointing out a misconception you have).
> But for everyone else, Emacs is a small part of a much larger ecosystem (MacOS, Linux, Windows) with which it is increasingly incompatible and archaic.
Actually, Emacs is pretty good at interacting with the wider ecosystems. It can communicate and interact with other processes, etc. I can, for example, link to a message in MS Outlook and have it open up in my TODO list in Emacs.
I've been an Emacs user for over 20 years. I like it, and find it productive. But it's stuck in a rut, in a very similar manner to Perl 5. If that isn't addressed, it will fade into the background. I'd argue that's already happened. None of my coworkers in any of the jobs I've worked in have used it, and that includes academia and various industries. It seems to be restricted to the uber-nerds who find out about it and go through the pain of learning how to drive it effectively. I used to use it for everything, from GNUS to org-mode, but my usage is declining.
The keybindings need to be fixed. CUA has been the norm for what, 35 years at this point. C-y is paste. C-z minimises the window (WTF!) C-_ is undo. It's not just nonstandard and counterintutive, it's unnecessarily nonstandard and counterintuitive. They aren't more efficient, they aren't more effective. It's a barrier to adoption which doesn't need to be there. It has a certain familiarity for us long-time users, but that's about it. Every other application uses something based on CUA, so it's not like we couldn't switch over.
While I certainly wouldn't want a "GNOME 3" type of makeover, where all the actual userbase are cast aside to be replaced by a hypothetical potential userbase which doesn't actually exist, I do think it's well worth a look at present-day alternatives and to make sure it doesn't fall behind. Because I think it actually has fallen behind, and it needs to get its act together to retain its relevance.
Recently I got a personal JetBrains subscription and started using CLion. While I still miss many little small features, there are quite a number of big features which Emacs doesn't attempt to do, and so the small annoyances are worth it for those large benefits. Emacs needs to be able to do better than this to not only keep up, but to do better than its competitors.
> (I'm not against CUA bindings by default - merely pointing out a misconception you have).
And you respond with:
> I don't really buy the argument I'm afraid.
And then you write a whole comment about how CUA is better.
Which argument did I make that you don't buy? Why is this a reply to my comment?
> I do think it's well worth a look at present-day alternatives and to make sure it doesn't fall behind.
In all my jobs that used IDEs (including JetBrains's excellent stuff), I used both the IDE and Emacs - the latter for text editing, etc. The former for all the goodies it brings (navigation, etc). There's no law saying it has to be one or the other. IDEs becoming very popular in no way threatens Emacs.
> Because I think it actually has fallen behind, and it needs to get its act together to retain its relevance.
I could really easily write a whole article on all the features Emacs has that many more popular editors don't have, and then end the article with "Those other editors are falling behind."
We have to clearly delineate what "falling behind" means, and whether it is relevant. VS Code gaining in popularity doesn't necessarily impact Emacs. In my career I've met an order of magnitude more Vim users, and Emacs is not the worse because of it. Emacs's capabilities have grown much faster than Vim's has, and Emacs has a lot more users than it used to. Furthermore, most Vim users I've encountered at work are not fairly advanced users: They just need something to edit files with. Having them switch to Emacs will neither help them nor the Emacs community.
I don't mind some of the proposed changes (nicer defaults, revamping the tutorial, etc). But I really don't want a mindless goal of increasing user counts. More users will not make Emacs gain more capabilities. Passionate users will.
The CUA issue seems frivolous, since retention among those who don't even do the built-in tutorial on the splash page was never going to be high. It might help somewhat, but the bigger issue with emacs is the association with spacemacs (vi), lisp, and "configurability", which attracts some but perhaps leads many more to disregard emacs as Kool-Aid and never even try it. The reason to use emacs is that the text-editing is superior. magit, org-mode, email, and so on having an unified interface is great, but the text-editing (navigation, mark and region, macros, rectangles, and more) is what I miss acutely when using anything else, and it's also the reason why the rest of emacs exists.
If it's so easy to switch, and a beginner is more likely to want it on, why not set it on by default and let everyone who wants it off put it in their config?
>If it's so easy to switch, and a beginner is more likely to want it on, why not set it on by default and let everyone who wants it off put it in their config?
Why is it important to prioritize beginners over experienced users?
I can understand that point of view in the context of a new product, or one that is struggling to make money from an existing product.
But last I checked, Emacs is free software, with no impetus for increasing "user counts" or "market share," since "revenue" from "sales" of GNU Emacs remains the same regardless of either.
Perhaps you might ask the fine folks over at Lugaru Software, ltd.[0] why they haven't done so.
Espeially since they've been selling their emacs-based Epsilon Programmer's Editor since 1984[1][2], which, incidentally, was before GNU Emacs was available for any desktop computers.
> Why is it important to prioritize beginners over experienced users?
In my opinion, because experienced users know how to configure their editor while beginners don't.
If "every expert" has their own tuned configuration, they really shouldn't care what the defaults are. It is (in my opinion) crazy to have options designed to make a system easier to use, which have to be searched out and turned on.
If Emacs doesn't care about user counts or market share, great. Emacs users can stop posting about it, and it can quietly fade away.
So what? Is your argument that if not many people/products/software packages do a certain thing a certain way, they should be rejected out of hand?
Back when I was a teen, I rode my skateboard goofy-footed[0]. That wasn't (and still isn't) the norm. Should I have been chastised or prevented from doing so?
I'm also left-handed. While I do keep the mouse on the left side of my keyboard, I do not swap the mouse buttons. As such, a right-click is done with my index finger and a left-click with my middle finger. That's not the norm either. Should I be criticized for that?
Chrome is, by far, the "norm" for web browsers. I use Firefox, and occasionally Vivaldi. Should FF or Vivaldi just make themselves clones of Chrome because they're not "the norm"?
I run sendmail and not postfix, even though that's much more "the norm." Does that make my MTA bad or less useful?
I could probably rattle off a dozen other similar things that aren't "the norm." Does that mean no one should do things that way or use them?
If you want/need an editor that uses CUA by default, there are dozens of editors that do so. Why should Emacs (or any other product that you don't contribute to or use) do things the way you want them to do so?
Historical note: CUA didn't come along until 1987. In 1985, the Lisa had been out for two years, and CUA was that far into the future, as indeed were Windows 2.0 and OS/2 1.0.
It's true that the claim that the Mac/Lisa key chords were the standard 35 years ago is quite wrong. But it's false to claim that there was another standard instead.
The numbers that do matter: Are the number of contributors increasing, decreasing, or stable? Are the number of users increasing, decreasing, or stable? Is the rate of increase (if increasing) for either of these itself increasing, decreasing, or stable?
As long as contributors and users are both increasing, you're probably ok. As long as the rates of increase are at least stable, you're ok.
It's not like this is a life or death struggle, emacs will probably outlive us all.
>Growing in terms of the number of users, dwindling in terms of the share among editors
That's as may be. Just because something has a high market share doesn't mean it's the best product.
Chrome is by far the most "popular" browser by market share, and that doesn't stop it from doing all kinds of stuff that benefits Google over users -- often to the detriment of those users.
Emacs is in that blissful state where it's resisting sacrificing its core user base by trying to cater to people who are not going to use it anyway.
As a long term user I am very happy with the direction of Emacs development over the past few years. Emacs is pretty much the only piece of modern software where I don't have worry about losing functionality when I upgrade to a new version. Each new version is better than the old one.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
Is it really necessary to ascribe some negative quality of ageism to people who created and use software and then castigate them for it? Do you work for PeopleSoft? Makes your argument seem weak and flimsy, in fact arguments like yours can be dismissed out of hand.
I've developed software since the early 1980s. I've used Emacs continuously since the late 1980s. Perhaps you should respond to the substance of a posting rather than complaining that a geezer used the term geezer to describe people like himself.
EDIT You created your account two days ago and you're already accusing people of ageism? Get off my lawn.
Don't know what platform you are on, but on Mac with the GUI version, standard cut-copy-paste keybindings all work, as well as select-all, save, close window (Cmd + w), undo.
I'm not talking about stupid fads such as skinning and color palette changes. But cut-copy-paste keybindings (not to mention select-all, save, close window, undo, etc.) are not a fad. They have been the standard in everything except for Emacs for over THIRTY FIVE YEARS. They were standard when Ronald Reagan was president.
Pop-up menus on right-button-click have been standard for almost as long, dating to X11 and NeXTSTEP (which is where OS X got them).
And the most awful trend is in preventing clear improvements in modes and functionality from coming to the forefront simply because geezers are not used to them. The argument seems to be that making all these kinds of things standard would be hard on the geezers. This is nonsense. Unlike the newbies, the geezers know how to turn this stuff off.
The geezers prevent this because Emacs is their ecosystem. But for everyone else, Emacs is a small part of a much larger ecosystem (MacOS, Linux, Windows) with which it is increasingly incompatible and archaic. This is myopia pure and simple.