Re: Emacs learning curve

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 8:13 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> If someone needs a data point that terminology doesn't matter much,
> read the manual for Vim -- it uses non-standard terminology (including
> "yank", btw, and other weirdly named commands), and yet is very
> popular.

I think that the situation is different for Vim. For example since it
uses "y" as a command prefix then talking about "yank" makes sense.
And since vi basic key bindings are fixed and that is a basic idea of
vi it makes even more sense.

But still it disturbed me quite a lot in the beginning (but learning
vi was a necessity then).

> I already wrote long ago in this thread that to make Emacs more
> attractive, we need to add to it hot new features that target software
> developers.  If we do that, and do it well, terminology differences
> and weird keybindings will not prevent hackers to come on board,
> because hackers want productivity features.

Strange key bindings makes it probably harder to attract new
developers and users.

And that is perhaps part of the reason that Emacs is lacking some features.

It seems to me that this is part of lack of coordination.
Standardizing makes is easier to coordinate. It is very difficult
though (and I think it is often mistaken as opposed to freedom to
cusomize).