Emacs has survived because it has adapted to the times before. Sadly it is not getting enough new/younger users if we compare with vim. Why promote tje creation of more derivatives if we could have a bigger community and avoid effort duplication, keep control, some order and reduce entropy, keeping standar format for documentation and closer communication and interaction and developement? As well as more potential contributions/contributors/developers? Spacemacs is pretty good but it has changed the configuration experience too much removing flexibility and some control to the user; thats the only thing to complain about it. It automatizes many things and reqires too many packages and dependencies in the basic state and adding a new package requires to create a pluging with 3 files... That's not the idea and it is not a right way to introduce emacs to newer users(in my oppinion), in spite of the interaction experience is good enough. Why not just improve the emacs defaults and the first impression? It is basically some ergonomy and marketing. Emacs is and should stay being a software for final users, and not developed as a base for derivatives like a kernel or so. In spite of many derivatives have existed among the years. Adaptation is the key for surviving. ⁣Sent from BlueMail ​ On 27 Aug 2018, 19:11, at 19:11, Filipp Gunbin wrote: >On 25/08/2018 12:34 +0200, Ergus wrote: > >> Newer users will go straight to google/duckduckgo to make the >> questions. Not only because they don't know exactly the name of what >> they are looking for, but also because that's the stackoverflow's >> culture. In the beginning they just want some code to copy and paste >> in the config. > >What I read in this thread makes me think that all this applies more to >Spacemacs and other derivatives. I doubt it makes sense to support in >default Emacs some configuration(s) for ever-changing landscape of >packages/plugins. Sounds like a job for a derivative's developers.