<story><title>Toward a “modern” Emacs</title><url>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/832311/03910e26a3f3e814/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mapgrep</author><text>I don’t know. I read the whole article and it seems the suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more “modern” by defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And the author of the article would like the development process to be more “modern.”&lt;p&gt;Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if not the most successful. It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks.&lt;p&gt;It is over &lt;i&gt;40 years old&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;When I see a highly successful 40+ year old piece of software, my first instinct isn’t to ask what the people behind it can learn from me but what I can learn from them.&lt;p&gt;I’m not saying the editor can not be improved. But I think the bar is much higher than this. It’s not an insult to say something like emacs is not “modern.” Of course it’s not. And changing the colors? The shortcuts that have worked for decades? Please.&lt;p&gt;If someone thinks emacs will be more successful with these cosmetic changes they are welcome to fork it since this is one of the earliest open source programs. Code talks, a bunch of people opining on a mailing list is pretty worthless in comparison.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hardwaregeek</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s great and all, but people who are learning emacs for the first time don&amp;#x27;t know or care that it&amp;#x27;s one of the most successful text editors or that it&amp;#x27;s been around for 40 years. They care about being able to write code effectively. And emacs doesn&amp;#x27;t let users write code effectively by modern standards. Sure, after boatloads of configuration and tinkering it does, but it&amp;#x27;s unclear if it&amp;#x27;s worth it.&lt;p&gt;Forking it is also missing the point. There&amp;#x27;s plenty of forks with dark coloring schemes and predefined packages. Spacemacs, Doom emacs, etc. The issue is that most people hear about emacs and try to download emacs, not Spacemacs, not Doom. They&amp;#x27;re then greeted by an unfriendly UI and confusing commands and dammit it doesn&amp;#x27;t even autocomplete JavaScript by default.&lt;p&gt;Dark color schemes and proper right click functionality might seen dumb, but they&amp;#x27;re one easy step towards making emacs seem like an editor for the 21st century and not something your dad used on a Lisp machine in the 80&amp;#x27;s.</text></comment>
<story><title>Toward a “modern” Emacs</title><url>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/832311/03910e26a3f3e814/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mapgrep</author><text>I don’t know. I read the whole article and it seems the suggestions boil down to emacs needing to be more “modern” by defaulting to dark mode, making color theming easier, changing right click behavior, the menus, and changing the shortcuts. And the author of the article would like the development process to be more “modern.”&lt;p&gt;Emacs is one of the most successful text editors of all time if not the most successful. It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks.&lt;p&gt;It is over &lt;i&gt;40 years old&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;When I see a highly successful 40+ year old piece of software, my first instinct isn’t to ask what the people behind it can learn from me but what I can learn from them.&lt;p&gt;I’m not saying the editor can not be improved. But I think the bar is much higher than this. It’s not an insult to say something like emacs is not “modern.” Of course it’s not. And changing the colors? The shortcuts that have worked for decades? Please.&lt;p&gt;If someone thinks emacs will be more successful with these cosmetic changes they are welcome to fork it since this is one of the earliest open source programs. Code talks, a bunch of people opining on a mailing list is pretty worthless in comparison.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Miraste</author><text>&amp;gt; It is widely used for a staggering array of tasks.&lt;p&gt;Is it? What area are you in? In my hobbyist, college, and industry experience I&amp;#x27;ve never seen anyone use emacs for anything. I have seen Vim (or at least vim bindings) a few times, but I only know of emacs from older unix discussions online.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Looking through stack overflow developer surveys, emacs use is in 16th place for editor popularity at ~4.5% usage, but has stayed close to that number for years.</text></comment>