Re: Changes for emacs 28

["Göktuğ Kayaalp" <self@gkayaalp.com>]

On 2020-09-09 09:26 +03, TEC <tecosaur@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> Unfortunately I can't imagine this taking a comparable length of time,
> or being nearly as easy.

I think experiences like this highlight two major clusters among Emacs
users: those who come to Emacs for Emacs, and those whow are attracted
to it because it has Org mode (or sth. else, but it seems to be Org mode
most of the time).

Those who come to Emacs for Emacs are mainly here because they
appreciate how Emacs caters to their need for an extensible,
customisable system which they can use to build up a computing
environment that’s tailor-made for their needs.  I fall within this
category.  I started with a blank init.el some 6 years ago.  When I
found Org mode or ESS or Elfeed or whatnot, it was because I was
actively looking for how to do the relevant thing in Emacs, because I
assumed that doing it in Emacs would allow me to sculpt the experience
to my liking, fine tune everything, and tie things nicely together.

Those who come to Emacs for Org mode, mu4e, or maybe something else
(I’ll just say Org mode from here on; assume a dangling ‘or maybe
something else’ for each instance), are fundamentally different.  You
fall into this category.  I of course can’t know your particular
experience, but what I deduce from reading /r/emacs to this day is this
kind of user generally finds out about Emacs as the thing that hosts Org
mode.  They are mainly interested in Org mode and some related
features.  They won’t find out about what users like me think are the
main virtues of Emacs until later, and they won’t find out about how
Emacs is traditionally used, customised, until even later.

There maybe is a third kind of user who thinks of it just another text
editor with some programming support, but I won’t risk more detailed
assumptions for this hypothetical category.

But, what I’ve described above is IMO something that’ll render itself
pretty obvious e.g. if you go to /r/emacs and read it for a week or two.

> I'm not sure that Emacs can embrace the behaviours that people who have
> primarily experienced the likes of VS Code/Atom/JetBrains/Sublime/etc.
> will be looking for, without compromising the experience that long-time
> users have come to expect. Perhaps the way forward may be to treat
> standard Emacs as a core and prominently offer 'distributions' of Emacs?

If what I said above is indeed relevant and truthy, it might be a nice
basis for introducing people to Emacs (the term ‘marketing’ is really
ugly, IMHO simply means ‘to deceive into thinking, with greedy malice’)
and proves, along with your experience that you document in your OP, how
useful could distributions be to cater to this particular category of
users, without compromising others.

I’d say we should leave distributions to the community, support them and
maybe ‘bless’ the projects that are willing as GNU projects, and make
sure that <gnu.org/s/emacs> and <orgmode.org> are displaying to the
users what’s available, possibly with some video introductions for each
which briefly introduce and overview the thing, and also some for a
variety of common use cases.

--
İ. Göktuğ Kayaalp / @cadadr / <https://www.gkayaalp.com/>
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