Re: Some developement questions

[Ergus <spacibba@aol.com>]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2018 at 12:13:36PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
>hw wrote:
>>My first step with 'emacs -q' would be to make the menu fonts larger.
>>As much as I like monospace fonts, the typewriter font used for the text
>>was *really ugly* even 30 years ago.  One look at Emacs with this font
>>might turn most people away before they start reading anything.
>
>This matches my perception too, when I show Emacs to students. Emacs 
>starts up in monospace font and that looks sooooo 1980s.  It's like 
>showing them a medieval manuscript: cool in some sense, but they won't 
>want to spend much of their working lives using it.
>
>A little bit of marketing would help here. The initial contents of 
>*scratch*, the mode line, and the minibuffer need not be monospaced, 
>and would all benefit from a better font.
>
Yes that was somehow my intention in the beginning. Give to the initial
user a better first impression. That includes a better interaction in
the beginning, access to customization, but also a better look counts
(the default color theme could be very improved). Most new users coming
from vim will like to use emacs in the terminal only, but it looks like
the latest efforts are now in the gui.

I think that new gui or windows users prefer sublime or other editors
that behave as they expect (C-c, C-v, click here and there and most
things working with no configuration needed) Emacs could provide that
experience if that's what the user likes.

But developing all this requires many developers, but you only get new
developers if you have more users (young students), but to have new
users you need a better initial experience... is a vicious circle.