Re: Making Emacs popular again with a video

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

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On Wed, 13 May 2020 at 18:50, Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> wrote:

> Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
>
> > [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> > [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> > [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> >
> >   > > Do Emacs's current competitors have the same capabilities?
> >   > They have pretty much everything but "self-documenting", which should
> >   > maybe be referred as "self-retrospecting" feature.
> >
> > Do people think it is desirable to delete most of that intro text?
> > It is uder 15 lines; perhaps it is harmless to keep it.
>
> I don't think it is very important issue. It is normal to have a bit
> longer introductorty text/description about application. It just does
> not need to take screen estate on the welcome screen maybe?
>
> By the way, I probably wouldn't try to identify Emacs as just a text
> editor longer. Personally I see Emacs as en extensible platform, or
> system (not in a sense of that joke of operating system), a tool, or
> whatever one might wish to call it. I think it has developed and become
> usefull much more then just as a text editor. Also I think it might help
> if Emacs developed even further in that direction, as a
> "multi-tool/swiss army knife" of human-computer interaction?
>
> I don't use other text editors, so I really don't know how good they are
> at other tasks then just text editing. I usually just take a look for
> the curiosity sake when a new editor/IDE becomes popular, and then I
> usually realize Emacs already has everything I need and just uninstall
> the new thing.
>
>
I think this touches on an important point. Emacs is more than an editor.
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 - it is not really a distinguishing
features. The key to what makes Emacs is a combination of extensibility and
self-documenting. For me, what makes Emacs different from nearly all the
alternatives is the ability to create the work environment and work flows I
want rather than conforming to the environment and workflows someone else
has defined. With a little effort, I can have my projects setup so that all
those boring and repetitive tasks are automated using a common framework,
language and interface. plus I get a whole lot of unified and consistent
tools/commands with that same interface, which makes dealing with the ad
hoc stuff faster/easier as well.

Unfortunately, this benefit is not going to be universal for all users. If
you don't have a need for workflows or if your requirement is just for
simple editing of text or if your simply not that interested or are happy
to use separate tools and environments etc, your really not going to see a
lot of benefit from Emacs over other editors. This makes me think that
aiming to make Emacs more popular may be a too generic objective. Perhaps
we need to consider who or what group of users we want Emacs to be popular
with. Should we be trying to identifyt which 'market' Emacs is going to be
most beneficial for and then target that group rather than just tyring to
be 'popular' in the more generic sense?

-- 
regards,

Tim

--
Tim Cross

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