A new user perspective about "Changes for emacs 28"

[Nicola Manca <nicola.manca85@gmail.com>]

Dear Emacs Developers,

I'm probably one of the newest emacs users in thin ML, I started using 
it since about one year. I decided to write this email hoping that my 
opinion as a "new emacs user" could add something to the ongoing 
discussion about emacs defaults.

I started using debian at high school, 20 year ago, as my only
operative system. This mainly for political agreement with the free 
software movement. Since then I tried to start using emacs several 
times, but I always gave up, despite my motivation towards free software 
in general.

Today I'm not a programmer, I'm a scientist and I never understood why I 
should spend time learning to use a software that I could barely shuth 
down (typically with a "pkill -9 emacs"). Last year a friend of mine 
spent few hours convincing me that emacs worth another try. He explained 
me the logic of keybinding (Meta is Alt, really?!?) and then the 
org-mode was the game-changing feature. I then did the tutorial a couple 
of times, copied something from his .emacs and then moved to 
stackexchange or reddit to look for more. First, I installed 
org-superstar, to have nice bullets, and then
learned how to change the default theme to dark one with decent
contrast and colors (sanityinc-tomorrow-night). Yes, sorry, I have to 
tell you that these are the priority for a new user: feel comfortable, 
so that he/she is motivated to spend time in something...

Now I use emacs on a daily basis. My .emacs is about 500 lines,
similarly to my TODO.org. By spending a non-negligible amount of time I 
managed to have a python environment comparable to other graphical 
editors (Spyder) and latex nicely configured in a similar way to 
TexStudio.  I even manage to have two dictionaries working together 
thanks to a discussion in this ML, super cool!

However, how many people have the opportunity and the will to spend tens 
of ours to just do in emacs what they already did in texstudio or 
spyder? I don't know if cry or laugh when I read that switching to a 
dark theme is a "radical change". I would love to see much more radical 
changes. There are a lot of low-hanging fruit that could make emacs 
appealing for new users and provide the enthusiasm required to overcome 
its steep learning curve.

These are just the first examples that came up in my mind:
- undo-tree-mode
- which-key-mode
- beacon-mode
- ido-mode (everywhere)
- helm-M-x

I'm aware that there are probably copyright or technical problems to 
make these defaults (together with a nice shiny theme). However, this 
should be the main objective of the development activity. In particular 
packages as WK or helm-M-x are very good for learning keystrokes. Humans 
learn by trials and errors, not by reading the manual, and these 
packages are great for this.

I bealive that the final goal should alwasy be to attract new users, 
otherwise non-free software will always have a larger userbase. So far, 
I've not the technical skills to do this, maybe someone out there can 
and want. However, my feeling is that there is not much push in this 
direction (maybe in the opposite) and this may results in lack of 
enthusiasm.

I want to thank Ergus for trying, and all the developers for the great 
software. May it become even better!

best wishes
Nicola