Re: What is the most useful potential feature which Emacs lacks?

[Christopher Lemmer Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

ndame writes:

> There is a discussion on Reddit about sponsoring development of
> multithreading in Emacs, and people there say it's too hard, takes a
> lot of time and it doesn't even bring that much benefit to the user.
>
> If this is the case (is it?) then what are those other features which
> could bring much more tangible benefits for the user and assuming
> somebody works on them full time sponsored by the community they can
> be implemented in, say, a few months?

I guess there are really two potential directions to think about it:

 - What is the most potentially useful direction for newcomers who are
   familiar with other mainstream UI patterns?
 - What is the most potentially useful project for existing everyday
   emacs users?

I think these are two separate things to solve.  IMO the former is more
important than the latter right now because Emacs has a way of making
users capable of extending it... it is one of the most beautiful things
about the choice of lisp as its configuration system.

So the real question to me would be: how do we lower the barrier to
entry?  There's been a lot of discussion on this, and I think the
most promising direction to me so far has been seeing the wild success
of Spacemacs as a "starter pack" that comes preconfigured in a way that
it feels familiar to Vim users.

These days most programmers start off in neither Vi(m) nor Emacs, they
start out with UI patterns that solidified after those programs were
made.  My suspicion is that a Spacemacs-like "starter pack" would solve
a lot of this, but it's work that's hard to motivate... once most
developers are far enough down the Emacs rabbit hole, doing this work
really doesn't do much to scratch their own itch.

Thus if there's a space for paid work, I think it would be to do this
work which might not be as directly useful to the developer, but would
be directly useful to other newcomers.  It would be useful and important
IMO to directly test against newcomers' experiences and collect feedback.

(The more difficult question to me would be: do the training wheels ever
come off the bike?  Or is it just a "different UI pattern" at that point
that one comes to accept and use emacs in that way?)