Re: Making Emacs popular again with a video

[Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>]

Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org> writes:

>> IMHO, we should not promote third-party "init files" as a primary
>> option, but rather improve Emacs itself.
>
> Maybe we should embrace them, and provide tools to build custom Emacs
> distributions.

Perhaps I was being unclear.  What I don't like is the suggestion that
we should just tell people to go to website X to download and install
a bunch of init files.

I think we could provide some _variant_ of what these distributions are
doing, namely sets of ready-made customization.  The question is how to
go about it.

I've been thinking a lot about this problem, but I have not had time to
do any serious work.  So please consider these ideas as tentative:

I would propose to add a concept of "custom profiles" (or simply
"profiles"), which are basically defthemes.  Please see the separate
(brief) discussion about this here, and also the related thread:

    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-04/msg02032.html

One can imagine these "profiles" to be big distributions like spacemacs,
or (perhaps better) small snippets or sets of customization.  Some of
these could/should be included in Emacs by default.

One can also imagine there being one profile providing "good defaults
for a new user".[1]  Maybe such a profile could be the default at some
point in the future, but this is IMHO better discussed and decided once
it actually exists.

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas

Footnotes:
[1] Eli has pointed out that the biggest hurdle is to decide what such a
     "profile" (in my terminology) should include.