From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Daniele Nicolodi Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: What improvements would be truly useful? Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 11:51:09 -0700 Message-ID: <86578165-1b41-e75c-7180-84d8edefc44b@grinta.net> References: <87inaiss6l.fsf@web.de> <6FCF6ACA-4F29-4B6B-BE9D-D7130C6E9495@gnu.org> <87fu5moe4c.fsf@web.de> <877eqyocro.fsf@web.de> <83zi3uz4nb.fsf@gnu.org> <0b1dd3fa-e0b0-ed20-a256-dd92d1c1826f@dancol.org> <8bc3c4c7-dfc7-987a-95e7-bd309e2326c6@cs.ucla.edu> <03118DC0-39DA-4AB5-980E-A33809B9A5EE@raeburn.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: blaine.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: blaine.gmane.org 1520275820 10728 195.159.176.226 (5 Mar 2018 18:50:20 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@blaine.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2018 18:50:20 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.6.0 To: emacs-devel@gnu.org Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Mon Mar 05 19:50:15 2018 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by blaine.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.84_2) (envelope-from ) id 1esvBK-00084s-TC for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 05 Mar 2018 19:49:55 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:50972 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1esvDL-0005X1-Pt for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 05 Mar 2018 13:51:59 -0500 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:42612) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1esvCg-0005Wn-0A for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 05 Mar 2018 13:51:19 -0500 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1esvCc-0003NR-0E for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 05 Mar 2018 13:51:18 -0500 Original-Received: from zed.grinta.net ([109.74.203.128]:57826) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1esvCb-0003Mb-8E for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 05 Mar 2018 13:51:13 -0500 Original-Received: from 688dnmac.campus.nist.gov (unknown [132.163.81.39]) (Authenticated sender: daniele) by zed.grinta.net (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 726C1E095E for ; Mon, 5 Mar 2018 18:51:11 +0000 (UTC) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=simple/simple; d=grinta.net; s=mail; t=1520275871; bh=af+2sIjTvu6xbNiV8nleAgwcsEDLLgnDmNHmalql95s=; h=Subject:To:References:From:Date:In-Reply-To:From; b=BXTXHoSpSRoG+78SkeHwwukmb9nkBEWP3hpHcbZd23hHe8ZzCQlkF/Kwk4NzT5akT Xm0Dv03FPByxQgdarXckHIQgfpM1OsqhFh5Vqlyza2kBQV80CE6Cmf26clNJgGsSCR EVtmGpVnrqPx49Ty1deQw7gTlwChZZWnaF9CTlhc= In-Reply-To: Content-Language: en-US X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.2.x-3.x [generic] [fuzzy] X-Received-From: 109.74.203.128 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.21 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: "Emacs-devel" Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:223290 Archived-At: On 3/5/18 6:11 AM, Richard Stallman wrote: > [[[ 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. ]]] > > An improvement in GC wouldn't be a bad thing, but it may not be worth > the effort. It is likely to lead to many bugs that would be hard to > fix. Once working, it would not make much difference to users. > It would only permit some operations on larger problems than now. > > When I was working at the AI Lab, one of the older programmers told me > that hackers are often eager to make improvements of this sort: which > make the program better in an abstract sense, but not better for > users. I took that advice to heart. Now I pass it on. > > Changing Emacs to handle indentation and alignment with > variable-width fonts would be an important and useful change. > Certain kinds of use would make sense, which currently don't. > > It would be a big step towards making Emacs do the job of > a word processor, which is what I would like to see some day. > Imagine if you could edit nicely formatted documents directly > with Emacs, instead of using LibreOffice? LibreOffice is > fine to use, it is free software, but it isn't Emacs. Richard, with all the due respect for your role in starting the Emacs project and the Free software movement, I don't think that dismissing contributions to Emacs on the base of their relative usefulness to implementing new features that you think are important, does any good to Emacs. Hackers work on Emacs because they like it, and scratch their own itch. I don't think that anyone is in the position to suggest how they should be spending their time. Even more so if (as far as I know) there is no agreed upon roadmap for the project. I think that what will help to keep Emacs relevant in the long run is modernizing its structure and code base, moving away from the baroque architecture that developed as a result of its very long history (and some less than optimally future proof design decisions). Personally, I find that better support for display with variable width fonts will not improve my use of Emacs. What would improve my user experience would be improvements to the display engine that will allow a better document viewing capabilities in something like pdf-tools (like continuous scrolling). The only effective (and not detrimental to the project) way to steer hacker attentions to features you find important is to pay them for their work. With your popularity it should not be impossible to rise enough money to do so. Cheers, Dan