Re: Making Emacs popular again with a video

[Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> The question is, is it worth spending a few paragraphs on those points:
>
>     > You are reading about GNU Emacs, the GNU incarnation of the advanced,
>     > self-documenting, customizable, extensible editor Emacs.
>
> When I wrote the first Emacs in 1976, these were exciting new advances.
> Most users had never imagined such features in an editor.
>
> Maybe today every programmer has seen such features elsewhere, and
> responds to that statement with, "ho hum."  If so, maybe we should
> delete those paragraphs.

I do think most of that introduction comes off as somewhat uninspired
and mundane if you don't know that backstory, such as:

    you can rebind the basic cursor motion commands (up, down, left and
    right) to any keys on the keyboard that you find comfortable

While some parts are more exciting:

    New commands are simply programs written in the Lisp language, which are
    run by Emacs’s own Lisp interpreter.  Existing commands can even be
    redefined in the middle of an editing session, without having to restart
    Emacs.

I think a rewrite would be in order.  But it's hard to write such a text
well.

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas