Re: a look at the browser scene & emacs

[Xiao-Yong Jin <xj2106@columbia.edu>]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

> Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> News about the browser world
>> http://www.macworld.com/article/139022/2009/02/safari4firstlook.html?t=232
>>
>> emacs really needs to keep up.
>>
>> The IDE idea, from 1990s to 2000, basically reduced emacs market share
>> from perhaps more than 50% in the early 1990s to maybe 1% today among
>> professional programers.
>>
>> emacs today has lots of problems. Many of the “emacs way”, are
>> technically inferior. But the nice elisp system holds it back still.
>>
>> The way for emacs to advance, is to get more people to use emacs.
>> Emacs users today are already just the very small clique, half of
>> which are perhaps over 40. With these small circle of people, every
>> idea that's not “emacs way” gets stamped out.
>
> Or gets adapted to the Emacs way.  The result is that people get one
> consistent tool.

As a under 40 user, I very much like the idea of being
consistent.  I don't like CUA mode and the new default
transient mark mode behavior.  But I do like the idea of
improving the display back-end of Emacs.  I love the
upcoming version 23 because of the anti-aliased font support
and much better handling of multibyte character encoding
system.

Nowadays, there are usually only three kinds of program on
my desktop.

    a. Emacs
    b. urxvt
    c. firefox

All sorts of shell modes in Emacs are slow compared to
urxvt.  And all web browsing modes are just lame.  I do most
of my work in Emacs, but external term and browser is
indispensable, as for now.  I would very much like to see
the ideal society where people only fire up Emacs and do all
sort of things in the good old Emacs way.  An efficient,
functional and versatile display back-end is what Emacs is
really lack of.  This might be what Emacs can learn from
webkit or XUL.


Xiao-Yong
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