Re: Making Emacs popular again with a video

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

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On Fri, 15 May 2020 at 00:19, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > From: Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>
> > Date: Thu, 14 May 2020 17:38:15 +1000
> > Cc: colinetnathan98@gmail.com,
> >  Andreas Röhler <andreas.roehler@online.de>,
> >  Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>, Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> >
> > To an extent, the editing aspects of Emacs are not particularly
> > interesting and most of the really great editing features of Emacs
> > have been incorporated into other editors anyway
>
> I would disagree, at least to some extent.  It is true that many Emacs
> features are available today elsewhere, but some surprisingly still
> aren't.  For example, what about transposing words or lines with one
> or 2 keystrokes?
>

I'm sure we will find some examples, though the ones you cited are
available in a number of editors (for example VS Code C-t = letter,
Shift-Ctl-t = word and Alt-Ctl-T for line transposing Many editors have
been inspired by and have borrowed/copied from Emacs. Features which use to
be only seen in Emacs are now seen in many other editors (column editing,
rectangle cut and paste, transposing letters, words and lines, multiple
cursors, etc. Most editors have some form of plugin or extention mechanism
and people have ported most of the useful features from Emacs. (though
their extension/plugin mechanism is typically much less flexible than
Emacs).

There are certainly some things Emacs still does better with respect to
editing, like editing of binary data or even ascii art etc. It is rare when
I've used another editor and missed a feature that I've not found the
feature is available - I may need to add a plugin or define a key binding
or define a macro (as in keyboard macros not lisp macro). However, in
general, I find these things which Emacs still does better to be really
fringe areas which I rarely use or need. The majority of advanced editing
features provided by emacs are available in most editors with a programming
orientation. In many of these editors, other things which are slightly
difficult to get working consistently in Emacs are available 'out of the
box'. For example, getting font ligatures and colour emojii working in VS
Code is trivial. In Emacs, it is harder and varies depending on which
platform you are on.

VS Code is probably a good example. While I still prefer Emacs, if I'm
really honest, from a purely editing perspective, VS Code is as good and
feature rich. Where it fails is in the ease of extensibility and ability to
customize to fit how I like to work - with VS Code, I need to adjust more
to how VS Code wants to work, but when it comes to just writing source
code, they are both pretty equivalent.


-- 
regards,

Tim

--
Tim Cross

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