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> To those familiar with Emacs development - is there a tendency to modernise the UI and generally make it an easier out-of-box experience? The OOB GNU experie

> To those familiar with Emacs development - is there a tendency to modernise the UI and generally make it an easier out-of-box experience? The OOB GNU experience is rather lack-luster. There's a ton of thing Emacs can do, but with the default preferences it doesn't. Some of these missing or bad defaults really feel odd. It seems the official GNU mantra is "if people aren't forced to look for things to customize, they wont really ever discover all the things Emacs can do for them". Which is kinda true. Basically, they want to encourage users to become "fully fluent Emacs-users", that is a person who can and will customize every part of the Emacs-experience. Which is a great goal! But the means used still puts a first-time novice user in a much more inferior-looking chair than he could have been put into. The "solution" for this has often been Emacs starter-kits (like prelude), which provides lots of better defaults, not to mention a curated list of addons and packages, making the OOB experience much more friendly. From here on it's probably all speculation, but a full starter-kit might leave the novice Emacs-user overwhelmed and incapable of customizing (he has no way to know what all the things the starter-kit sets or includes does, and why. He will not know what is Emacs and what comes from addons. Etc etc). IMO this can hurt the long-term prospect of the user actually becoming a fully fluent Emacs-user. On the other-side, you have the GNU Stance where IMO they risk alienating people from becoming Emacs-users all together. And that's even worse. I don't like to be all black and white and say "this side is the only way". There really should be a middle-ground somewhere, but it seems GNU is not willing to provide it. And that's really quite a shame.

stinkytaco 10y ago
As someone who recently picked up emacs (as in the past couple of years), I actually didn't find it that overwhelming. I'm not sure what "modernize" means in this sense, but other than trying to remember some fairly arcane key combos, it's a fairly straightforward system. Certainly no more difficult to grok that vim's modal system. If a user is new, start with the tutorial and get a feel for the navigation. Then I watched a few videos online to help me with more advanced stuff. After that point, Google was my friend if I needed to do something specific. That said, I feel like emacs could update a few defaults and include a few packages to create less setup time. Like shipping an official starter package (dnf install emacs-starter) so people can choose what they want.
hatmatrix 10y ago
GNU Emacs doesn't provide it directly, but rather provides the tools to enable it. For instance, http://batsov.com/prelude/ http://batsov.com/prelude/ https://ergoemacs.github.io/ https://ergoemacs.github.io/ or CUA-mode. I haven't tried any of these so can't speak to the experience, but the idea is that a custom layer for various users can be built on top and distributed to desired users (so it's almost out-of-the-box). Spacemacs is also a good example targeting VIM users.

stinkytaco 10y ago

As someone who recently picked up emacs (as in the past couple of years), I actually didn't find it that overwhelming. I'm not sure what "modernize" means in this sense, but other than trying to remember some fairly arcane key combos, it's a fairly straightforward system. Certainly no more difficult to grok that vim's modal system. If a user is new, start with the tutorial and get a feel for the navigation. Then I watched a few videos online to help me with more advanced stuff. After that point, Google was my friend if I needed to do something specific. That said, I feel like emacs could update a few defaults and include a few packages to create less setup time. Like shipping an official starter package (dnf install emacs-starter) so people can choose what they want.

hatmatrix 10y ago

GNU Emacs doesn't provide it directly, but rather provides the tools to enable it. For instance, http://batsov.com/prelude/ http://batsov.com/prelude/ https://ergoemacs.github.io/ https://ergoemacs.github.io/ or CUA-mode. I haven't tried any of these so can't speak to the experience, but the idea is that a custom layer for various users can be built on top and distributed to desired users (so it's almost out-of-the-box). Spacemacs is also a good example targeting VIM users.