Re: How to make Emacs popular again.

[Bob Newell <bobnewell@bobnewell.net>]

James Lu <jamtlu@gmail.com> writes:

> Can your response be summarized like this?
>
> "Let's keep doing the same thing we're doing now
> and get the same result we've been getting for decades."

No, that's a complete misreading! And in any case, Emacs has
grown and developed over the years, and become ever more
powerful. That's positive change with positive results.

I perhaps wasn't clear enough about saying that of course more
high-quality documentation would be a good thing, that more
clarity would be a good thing, and that easing the learning
curve would be a good thing. (That's not to say that there
isn't already a lot of good documentation available, although
perhaps scattered about.)

The other side of that, though, is that I wouldn't like to see
Emacs turned into some bloated monster. It's large enough as
it is, but at least the size relates to the power. Emacs was
never big on frills and cosmetics.

Perhaps we have different concepts of what Emacs is or should
be, and that's fine. The Emacs community is broad and a
variety of opinions exist, as they should.

I don't want Emacs to be Visual Studio. I certainly don't want
it to be like an office suite with toolbars and ribbons filled
with incomprehensible icons. I'm comfortable with the idea of
putting in effort to get a lot more back in return. In turn, I
recognize the need to keep the community active by bringing in
new people. It's a balancing act but if we don't stay true to
the core concepts of Emacs, which to me are unrivaled power
and flexibility with a minimalist, unobtrusive interface,
I think we will have gone in an unfortunate direction.

I don't really know the statistics: is the Emacs audience
truly in decline? By what measure? This is not a challenge but
a genuine question; I really don't know the answer.

-- 
Bob Newell
Honolulu, Hawai`i

- Via GNU/Linux/Emacs/Gnus/BBDB