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Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

Seems like you completely missed the point of the article.

The article called out that none of the changes make emacs any less powerful nor do any of the changes remove any functionality. Users can still do everything they could always do with emacs. They can still take this "journey" you mention. All the changes do is let them get started quicker and jump in with at least some familiarity.

Old emacs users such as yourself can keep on using your non-standard keys and old terminology. For you, nothing would change. For new users, they'd be productive quicker and still able to take advantage of all the things that keep fans of emacs using to emacs.

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I can't help but feel that you missed the point of my comment. New users should be encouraged to make those changes themselves if they feel the need to. If that's not something they're interested in, why use Emacs?

Anyone can publish a config and distribute it. For instance, the author of this article could create a 'new user friendly' config and distribute it just like doom, spacemacs, etc. If it's popular enough it will see a lot of use, but my guess is it would most likely wallow.

Making those changes default would require existing users to update their configs, not necessarily a big deal, but for what? So a new user can download Emacs, play with it for a minute, and still conclude that Emacs is a dusty relic because they don't understand the philosophy?

The whole idea of chasing new Emacs users is kind of silly, Emacs is more popular than it has ever been, and if a new user doesn't come to Emacs for what Emacs offers they were never going to stay.

Out of the box solutions already exist, Emacs is in a different category, and need not compete in that arena - especially at the expense of current users.

Appreciate the reply, cheers.

> I can't help but feel that you missed the point of my comment. New users should be encouraged to make those changes themselves if they feel the need to. If that's not something they're interested in, why use Emacs?

This whole response is the reason Emacs is rapidly approaching EOL.

You're putting the onus on new users to modify Emacs into a more beginner-friendly, standards-friendly editor? Their response would be: thanks, but I'll go try out Eclipse instead.

It's not that new users desperately want to use Emacs. It's that emacs is losing userbase at a tremendous clip because its UI and design is so ancient and crufty and because the community leaders think that's Just Fine for Them. If the emacs community wants new blood, it's they who have to implement changes to attract it.

> You're putting the onus on new users to modify Emacs into a more beginner-friendly, standards-friendly editor? Their response would be: thanks, but I'll go try out Eclipse instead.

Emacs has grown quite a bit since Eclipse's first release.

So yes, definitely let them try out Eclipse or VS Code instead. It won't hurt Emacs. See my other comment[1].

I've said it in the past, but there's a strange obsession HN folks have with comparing Emacs to VSCode or IDEs. SW development is merely one use case for Emacs. If you look at the last emacsconf, the majority of talks had nothing to do with SW development. Quite a few of the presenters, if not most, are not professional SW developers. Some of Emacs's most popular packages were created by non-programmers. Emacs will continue to grow even as fewer and fewer SW developers use Emacs for professional development.

> It's that emacs is losing userbase at a tremendous clip

Is there any evidence they are losing users? Why do people keep thinking this? As an Emacs user, I see a lot more Emacs packages being published than in the past.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28342477

> New users should be encouraged to make those changes themselves if they feel the need to.

It’s not like that any more. People don’t want to write a lot of lisp configuration as soon as they pick up a new editor; there are too many good alternatives out there. For programmers working in multiple languages, VSCode is now superior because it supports LSP fantastically for many languages (source: used emacs daily for 20 years, programming for 20 years).

I agree emacs is special. And I think you and I would agree on a lot of this: I wish emacs would embrace its identity as a sharp-edged and extremely powerful tool for programmers and stop messing around trying to be friendly to new users. But that doesn’t mean having bad/antiquated defaults.We need to attract new programmers for they will be the future maintainers of emacs. (Once we move emacs development to github/gitlab and away from a bunch of old men arguing on emacs-devel).

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28185317 for my views on future emacs.

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