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> "Perhaps we should implement a mode that puts cosmetics on Emacs so it will appeal to those who judge by the surface of things." I'm sorry to react to first

> "Perhaps we should implement a mode that puts cosmetics on Emacs so it will appeal to those who judge by the surface of things." I'm sorry to react to first quote, but as I kept reading I kept coming back to it. My thoughts on that : how you present yourself is how you want (and are going) to be judged. In general I think Emacs has been user-hostile, as said here, just by its terminology. Nobody outside a minority of devs (a minority even among programmers) refers to Ctrl+c as C-c. > Yes, make Emacs appealing and user friendly. But don't forget that a masterful tool in the end requires mastery, which can't come for free. And the old "I have suffered therefore the others have to suffer".

microcolonel 6y ago
> Nobody outside a minority of devs refers to Ctrl+c as C-c. First, C-c is not Ctrl + c; second, it really helps to use compact notation when you read a lot of keybindings; and third, this is approximately the most minor complication in the learning curve of Emacs (otherwise nobody would learn vim, with its insane key mappings and invisible mode transitions).
- jrimbault 6y ago
  Exactly what I mean. It is insane. I can't get it straight. I really tried years ago. But it is plain and simple stupid. Words once written don't need to be abbreviated. Abbrevation is only useful when writting for speed. When writting for being read don't use them.
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    > Exactly what I mean. It is insane. I can't get it straight. I really tried years ago. But it is plain and simple stupid. No, you're just being ignorant, and not reading when people try to answer your questions. > Abbreviation is only useful when writing for speed. When writing for reading, don't use them. It's not an abbreviation, it's a different symbol. C is not Ctrl. The software has some “baggage”, being the heir to a 40+ year legacy, but the problems you're ragging on are so shallow that it just tells me you never tried. Why would anyone want to continue holding the hand of somebody who isn't even trying? Emacs is full of excellent documentation, the first thing it tells you when you open it is how to find the documentation, and if you have a mouse you can just click it; if you opened it and decided not to read the intro, but somehow a lot of other people are using it productively, maybe the main problem lies with you. If you're looking for a piece of software that'll give you some sort of religious aesthetic orgasm just looking at it; sure, you'll be let down. If you were trying to get something done and approaching it honestly, these would not be your complaints about Emacs; trust me that there's a lot wrong with it. Having its own slightly different keybinding notation is like... number five thousand on the long list of actual issues with any honest attempt to be productive with Emacs.
    - jrimbault 6y ago
      And yet I could get a few things done in vim in a few minutes, and much more than that in a few weeks. And I choose not to use vim. And yet you said vim has insane key mapping but more people somehow use vim than emacs. Some things are not adding up. Emacs has excellent documentation but somehow very few people are able to use it. Some things are not adding up. Emacs interface and community mannerisms _are_ user-hostile. As demonstrated by history.
      - rglullis 6y ago
        Hey, chill. There are lots of things that seem daunting at first and unforgiving to the impatient beginner: chess, surfing, martial arts, drawing... it doesn't mean that any of those are user-hostile, it just means that those that want to learn and master it will need to develop a certain discipline. If you don't want that, fine. But what is the point of going around and saying that those who do enjoy these things are stupid?
        jrimbault 6y ago
        I did not say they are stupid. I'm saying some communities build on pseudo-elitism. It's not stupid to enjoy using a text editor. It's stupid to argue that because it's hard to use (and hard to master) "you're just not getting it". I think the expirement is over and conclusions can be drawn : emacs represent a tiny proportion of text editor's users, not because of a lack of features (is there's one thing missing it won't be for long), but because of what it is and the people and community around it.
        rglullis 6y ago
        > It's stupid to argue that because it's hard to use (and hard to master) "you're just not getting it". It is also a bad misrepresentation of the point made by the person that you originally quoted. Let me try an analogy: emacs is Olympic-sized pool, 50m long, 5m deep, with a 10m jump platform. It has been in use for decades by all kinds of people. Some new people see some amazing swimmers and divers using that pool and want to join. Problem is, they also don't know how to dive and are still learning to swim so they ask for a nice ladder on the corner and they want the pool to have one end shallow enough for people to stand on. The developer is basically saying: yeah, getting in there is intimidating at first and we can do some improvements to help beginners, but we also need to find a way to get those beginners to get into the training program, train harder and dedicate themselves to diving, otherwise it would just be a waste of time and resources. Oh, and we also need to keep in mind that none of these changes should affect the people that are already training here for years.
  - neutronicus 6y ago
    I think that is wrong actually. I find it harder to scan my eyes over Ctrl+Alt+a than C-M-a (notice that Apple, too, uses single glyphs for modifier keys).
    - plorkyeran 6y ago
      I've used macOS for ten years now and I'm still regularly confused by Apple's modifier key glyphs.
      - zozbot234 6y ago
        Those aren't "Apple's glyphs", they're part of the ISO/IEC 9995 standard for common keyboard layouts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_9995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_9995 Perhaps Emacs and the Linux desktop should start using these characters by default, seeing as they now have good Unicode support.
        pseudalopex 6y ago
        Control and Option/Alternate are different. Most keyboards and most software don't use either set.
- forrestthewoods 6y ago
  What is C-c? I have never used emacs so these comments are very confusing.
  - Ataraxic 6y ago
    It's the notation for the shortcut Ctrl+c, which would be used in windows to copy and Ctrl+v for paste. It's written in most emacs documentation as C-c for brevity.
  - jrimbault 6y ago
    It's usually the Ctrl key, but most emacs users would rebind that. So it's not the Ctrl key.
    - gmfawcett 6y ago
      Some users will rebind it, I don't think we can say "most" unless we have some data to support that.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    Emacs' notation for keybindings uses C for indicating the Ctrl/Cmd key and M for the Meta (alt). Things like C-c C-v are chords. <Ctrl+c> and <Ctrl+v>. I might be wrong, but I believe that the reason that parent commenter said that "C is not Ctrl" is due to the fact that you can map these keys to any where you want. Most emacs and lispers prefer to have C key bound to caps lock.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      > I might be wrong, but I believe that the reason that parent commenter said that "C is not Ctrl" is due to the fact that you can map these keys to any where you want. Most emacs and lispers prefer to have C key bound to caps lock. Yeah, but it's still a control key. I mean, xev literally registers "Control_L" when I press the key that is physically labeled "Caps Lock".
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
F-0X 6y ago
> And the old "I have suffered therefore the others have to suffer". Actually, its an extremely important point. Tools which optimise for the professional are better than those which do so for the noob. Whenever you can achieve both, do so, but never side with the beginner otherwise. People should learn their tools, and they shouldn't be beginners for long, so making things "friendly" at the cost of rewarding expertise is poor design.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  This is absolutely true. However, if you can make a tool more learnable for new users without sacrificing its optimization for power users, you should. One way to do that is to not gratuitously invent new terms, and to use terms people are familiar with. Using conventions like "M-x" throughout the documentation, even with a note at the front of the manual that "We refer to Alt as Meta for historical reasons.", is needlessly baroque. Worse yet, maintaining a distinction that those aren't effectively the same thing for almost all users is needlessly unhelpful. (Yes, it's possible to make Alt and Meta different keys under X with use of modifier maps. That explanation belongs in an "advanced keybindings" chapter late in the documentation.) It's certainly possible to learn that, and a hundred other gratuitous weirdnesses, but they don't actually add value that justifies imposing that weirdness on every user.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    There's some bad stuff in emacs but to concern yourself with Meta as opposed to M- is plain silly. > if you can make a tool more learnable for new users without sacrificing its optimization for power users, you should Yes, but it's incredibly difficult and frankly the emacs devs have enough to do (and they do it well), and UI design is a very different skillset from programming. Frankly the learning curve for emacs is not going to improve, muchas we both might wish it. The biggest problem is people want the benefits of freely downloadable software but mainly aren't prepared to give anything back. Go and assist with emacs or some other project.
    - luu 6y ago
jmoss20 6y ago
I don't think emacs is "user-hostile" on purpose. You have to keep in mind, it's nearly 45 years old. This is almost unprecedented in computing. Today's users expect different things than users did in the 70s (who expected different things than users in the 80s, 90s, so on). Emacs has been relatively consistent through time, which has been a huge boon to emacs users. The tradeoff is against current user's intuitions -- for better or worse, emacs does not work like other popular software today. Calling this "user-hostile" comes off somewhat entitled. Emacs developers in the 70s/80s/90s/00s simply didn't know enough about today's users to cater to us, even if they wanted to. That's hardly their fault. So, todays way and the emacs way have diverged some, and it does take a bit of effort to learn. Not because emacs hates you! But because emacs is ancient. The (objective, non-stockholm-syndrome) reward for your efforts to understand it are a) mastery of a system useful enough to survive this long, and b) mastery of a system that isn't likely to change out from under you.
- freddie_mercury 6y ago
  > You have to keep in mind, it's nearly 45 years old. This is almost unprecedented in computing. We can acknowledge Emacs's longevity without straying into unsupportable hyperbole. Emacs is nowhere close to unprecedented in its age and not remotely close to the oldest piece of software still in existence. GNU Emacs is from 1984. It is a reimplementation of the earlier 1972 Emacs. This matters, since if you're including reimplementations then obviously Unix itself, which is used by many of us every day, it older. And if you start counting from 1984...that's not especially old.
  - jmoss20 6y ago
    Fair enough! But the point stands, no? I pointed out emacs' age to note how users expectations of editors have evolved over that time. Certainly there is older software -- but is there any other user-facing software that has survived such a dramatically shifting landscape? That is the part I find unprecedented (and the part relevant to GP).
    - b3n 6y ago
catalogia 6y ago
My keyboard doesn't have a 'ctrl' key, it has 'control'. I don't know why removing all the vowels from the word is considered more 'correct' than referring to the key by the first letter. Both 'C-' and 'Ctrl+' are ways of shortening the word. It also takes what, five minutes to get accustomed to? Even old dogs can learn this new trick.
blihp 6y ago
When it was written, there were no widespread GUIs. Standardized keyboard layouts on computers were just starting to be a thing. Many of its users were using terminals, not workstations or PCs. So they adopted, and probably more often invented, terminology and conventions for a world that predated almost everything people today know and understand. So it's not user-hostile, it's just really old. The knee-jerk answer would be 'well just update the conventions/terminology'. The problem is, update it to what? There is no timeless terminology they can use. As the tech industry increasingly resembles the fashion industry, they'd need to slap a new coat of UI paint on it at least every 10 years to keep up... as what was 'user friendly' terminology today won't be in not too many years. So now the developers are spending a big chunk of their time 'modernizing' it rather than actually making it better... not something most developers are interested in doing for a passion project.
- ableal 6y ago
  > Many of its users were using terminals Perhaps an example will be more vivid. In the eighties most people who were on the internet worked on a 24 line by 80 column terminal. Some people used Emacs buffers as a predecessor to multiple windows on large screens: - Edit your code, perhaps splitting the screen in two buffers to look at different files or places in a large file. - Split yet again one buffer for compilation error messages. - Split the other one for a shell subprocess to run the program, check mail, etc. Basically all-Emacs all day. Not my setup, but I saw it done often enough.
- rodgerd 6y ago
  > So it's not user-hostile, it's just really old. Expecting people to adapt to 1984 - which, just a reminder folks, is more than 30 years ago - rather than updating your documentation and maybe some keybindings to better reflect today is in fact incredibly fucking user hostile.
wglb 6y ago
> I think Emacs has been user-hostile I don't agree. It requires a bit of learning if you are used to something else. >I have suffered therefore the others have to suffer This isn't true. Try, instead "I put some effort into learning it, and you can too." Deeper understanding leads to higher productivity.
- ensiferum 6y ago
  Ah yeah, the minutes of saved effort after pouring hours of effort into trying to understand esoteric arcane emacs-only concepts and writing some Elisp. seriously though, it's a rabbit hole. Been there myself, now I just us vscode and it's a breeze!

microcolonel 6y ago

> Nobody outside a minority of devs refers to Ctrl+c as C-c. First, C-c is not Ctrl + c; second, it really helps to use compact notation when you read a lot of keybindings; and third, this is approximately the most minor complication in the learning curve of Emacs (otherwise nobody would learn vim, with its insane key mappings and invisible mode transitions).

jrimbault 6y ago
Exactly what I mean. It is insane. I can't get it straight. I really tried years ago. But it is plain and simple stupid. Words once written don't need to be abbreviated. Abbrevation is only useful when writting for speed. When writting for being read don't use them.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  > Exactly what I mean. It is insane. I can't get it straight. I really tried years ago. But it is plain and simple stupid. No, you're just being ignorant, and not reading when people try to answer your questions. > Abbreviation is only useful when writing for speed. When writing for reading, don't use them. It's not an abbreviation, it's a different symbol. C is not Ctrl. The software has some “baggage”, being the heir to a 40+ year legacy, but the problems you're ragging on are so shallow that it just tells me you never tried. Why would anyone want to continue holding the hand of somebody who isn't even trying? Emacs is full of excellent documentation, the first thing it tells you when you open it is how to find the documentation, and if you have a mouse you can just click it; if you opened it and decided not to read the intro, but somehow a lot of other people are using it productively, maybe the main problem lies with you. If you're looking for a piece of software that'll give you some sort of religious aesthetic orgasm just looking at it; sure, you'll be let down. If you were trying to get something done and approaching it honestly, these would not be your complaints about Emacs; trust me that there's a lot wrong with it. Having its own slightly different keybinding notation is like... number five thousand on the long list of actual issues with any honest attempt to be productive with Emacs.
  - jrimbault 6y ago
    And yet I could get a few things done in vim in a few minutes, and much more than that in a few weeks. And I choose not to use vim. And yet you said vim has insane key mapping but more people somehow use vim than emacs. Some things are not adding up. Emacs has excellent documentation but somehow very few people are able to use it. Some things are not adding up. Emacs interface and community mannerisms _are_ user-hostile. As demonstrated by history.
    - rglullis 6y ago
      Hey, chill. There are lots of things that seem daunting at first and unforgiving to the impatient beginner: chess, surfing, martial arts, drawing... it doesn't mean that any of those are user-hostile, it just means that those that want to learn and master it will need to develop a certain discipline. If you don't want that, fine. But what is the point of going around and saying that those who do enjoy these things are stupid?
      - jrimbault 6y ago
        I did not say they are stupid. I'm saying some communities build on pseudo-elitism. It's not stupid to enjoy using a text editor. It's stupid to argue that because it's hard to use (and hard to master) "you're just not getting it". I think the expirement is over and conclusions can be drawn : emacs represent a tiny proportion of text editor's users, not because of a lack of features (is there's one thing missing it won't be for long), but because of what it is and the people and community around it.
        rglullis 6y ago
        > It's stupid to argue that because it's hard to use (and hard to master) "you're just not getting it". It is also a bad misrepresentation of the point made by the person that you originally quoted. Let me try an analogy: emacs is Olympic-sized pool, 50m long, 5m deep, with a 10m jump platform. It has been in use for decades by all kinds of people. Some new people see some amazing swimmers and divers using that pool and want to join. Problem is, they also don't know how to dive and are still learning to swim so they ask for a nice ladder on the corner and they want the pool to have one end shallow enough for people to stand on. The developer is basically saying: yeah, getting in there is intimidating at first and we can do some improvements to help beginners, but we also need to find a way to get those beginners to get into the training program, train harder and dedicate themselves to diving, otherwise it would just be a waste of time and resources. Oh, and we also need to keep in mind that none of these changes should affect the people that are already training here for years.
- neutronicus 6y ago
  I think that is wrong actually. I find it harder to scan my eyes over Ctrl+Alt+a than C-M-a (notice that Apple, too, uses single glyphs for modifier keys).
  - plorkyeran 6y ago
    I've used macOS for ten years now and I'm still regularly confused by Apple's modifier key glyphs.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      Those aren't "Apple's glyphs", they're part of the ISO/IEC 9995 standard for common keyboard layouts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_9995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_9995 Perhaps Emacs and the Linux desktop should start using these characters by default, seeing as they now have good Unicode support.
      - pseudalopex 6y ago
        Control and Option/Alternate are different. Most keyboards and most software don't use either set.
forrestthewoods 6y ago
What is C-c? I have never used emacs so these comments are very confusing.
- Ataraxic 6y ago
  It's the notation for the shortcut Ctrl+c, which would be used in windows to copy and Ctrl+v for paste. It's written in most emacs documentation as C-c for brevity.
- jrimbault 6y ago
  It's usually the Ctrl key, but most emacs users would rebind that. So it's not the Ctrl key.
  - gmfawcett 6y ago
    Some users will rebind it, I don't think we can say "most" unless we have some data to support that.
- rglullis 6y ago
  Emacs' notation for keybindings uses C for indicating the Ctrl/Cmd key and M for the Meta (alt). Things like C-c C-v are chords. <Ctrl+c> and <Ctrl+v>. I might be wrong, but I believe that the reason that parent commenter said that "C is not Ctrl" is due to the fact that you can map these keys to any where you want. Most emacs and lispers prefer to have C key bound to caps lock.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > I might be wrong, but I believe that the reason that parent commenter said that "C is not Ctrl" is due to the fact that you can map these keys to any where you want. Most emacs and lispers prefer to have C key bound to caps lock. Yeah, but it's still a control key. I mean, xev literally registers "Control_L" when I press the key that is physically labeled "Caps Lock".
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

F-0X 6y ago

> And the old "I have suffered therefore the others have to suffer". Actually, its an extremely important point. Tools which optimise for the professional are better than those which do so for the noob. Whenever you can achieve both, do so, but never side with the beginner otherwise. People should learn their tools, and they shouldn't be beginners for long, so making things "friendly" at the cost of rewarding expertise is poor design.

JoshTriplett 6y ago
This is absolutely true. However, if you can make a tool more learnable for new users without sacrificing its optimization for power users, you should. One way to do that is to not gratuitously invent new terms, and to use terms people are familiar with. Using conventions like "M-x" throughout the documentation, even with a note at the front of the manual that "We refer to Alt as Meta for historical reasons.", is needlessly baroque. Worse yet, maintaining a distinction that those aren't effectively the same thing for almost all users is needlessly unhelpful. (Yes, it's possible to make Alt and Meta different keys under X with use of modifier maps. That explanation belongs in an "advanced keybindings" chapter late in the documentation.) It's certainly possible to learn that, and a hundred other gratuitous weirdnesses, but they don't actually add value that justifies imposing that weirdness on every user.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  There's some bad stuff in emacs but to concern yourself with Meta as opposed to M- is plain silly. > if you can make a tool more learnable for new users without sacrificing its optimization for power users, you should Yes, but it's incredibly difficult and frankly the emacs devs have enough to do (and they do it well), and UI design is a very different skillset from programming. Frankly the learning curve for emacs is not going to improve, muchas we both might wish it. The biggest problem is people want the benefits of freely downloadable software but mainly aren't prepared to give anything back. Go and assist with emacs or some other project.
  - luu 6y ago

jmoss20 6y ago

I don't think emacs is "user-hostile" on purpose. You have to keep in mind, it's nearly 45 years old. This is almost unprecedented in computing. Today's users expect different things than users did in the 70s (who expected different things than users in the 80s, 90s, so on). Emacs has been relatively consistent through time, which has been a huge boon to emacs users. The tradeoff is against current user's intuitions -- for better or worse, emacs does not work like other popular software today. Calling this "user-hostile" comes off somewhat entitled. Emacs developers in the 70s/80s/90s/00s simply didn't know enough about today's users to cater to us, even if they wanted to. That's hardly their fault. So, todays way and the emacs way have diverged some, and it does take a bit of effort to learn. Not because emacs hates you! But because emacs is ancient. The (objective, non-stockholm-syndrome) reward for your efforts to understand it are a) mastery of a system useful enough to survive this long, and b) mastery of a system that isn't likely to change out from under you.

freddie_mercury 6y ago
> You have to keep in mind, it's nearly 45 years old. This is almost unprecedented in computing. We can acknowledge Emacs's longevity without straying into unsupportable hyperbole. Emacs is nowhere close to unprecedented in its age and not remotely close to the oldest piece of software still in existence. GNU Emacs is from 1984. It is a reimplementation of the earlier 1972 Emacs. This matters, since if you're including reimplementations then obviously Unix itself, which is used by many of us every day, it older. And if you start counting from 1984...that's not especially old.
- jmoss20 6y ago
  Fair enough! But the point stands, no? I pointed out emacs' age to note how users expectations of editors have evolved over that time. Certainly there is older software -- but is there any other user-facing software that has survived such a dramatically shifting landscape? That is the part I find unprecedented (and the part relevant to GP).
  - b3n 6y ago

catalogia 6y ago

My keyboard doesn't have a 'ctrl' key, it has 'control'. I don't know why removing all the vowels from the word is considered more 'correct' than referring to the key by the first letter. Both 'C-' and 'Ctrl+' are ways of shortening the word. It also takes what, five minutes to get accustomed to? Even old dogs can learn this new trick.

blihp 6y ago

When it was written, there were no widespread GUIs. Standardized keyboard layouts on computers were just starting to be a thing. Many of its users were using terminals, not workstations or PCs. So they adopted, and probably more often invented, terminology and conventions for a world that predated almost everything people today know and understand. So it's not user-hostile, it's just really old. The knee-jerk answer would be 'well just update the conventions/terminology'. The problem is, update it to what? There is no timeless terminology they can use. As the tech industry increasingly resembles the fashion industry, they'd need to slap a new coat of UI paint on it at least every 10 years to keep up... as what was 'user friendly' terminology today won't be in not too many years. So now the developers are spending a big chunk of their time 'modernizing' it rather than actually making it better... not something most developers are interested in doing for a passion project.

ableal 6y ago
> Many of its users were using terminals Perhaps an example will be more vivid. In the eighties most people who were on the internet worked on a 24 line by 80 column terminal. Some people used Emacs buffers as a predecessor to multiple windows on large screens: - Edit your code, perhaps splitting the screen in two buffers to look at different files or places in a large file. - Split yet again one buffer for compilation error messages. - Split the other one for a shell subprocess to run the program, check mail, etc. Basically all-Emacs all day. Not my setup, but I saw it done often enough.
rodgerd 6y ago
> So it's not user-hostile, it's just really old. Expecting people to adapt to 1984 - which, just a reminder folks, is more than 30 years ago - rather than updating your documentation and maybe some keybindings to better reflect today is in fact incredibly fucking user hostile.

wglb 6y ago

> I think Emacs has been user-hostile I don't agree. It requires a bit of learning if you are used to something else. >I have suffered therefore the others have to suffer This isn't true. Try, instead "I put some effort into learning it, and you can too." Deeper understanding leads to higher productivity.

ensiferum 6y ago
Ah yeah, the minutes of saved effort after pouring hours of effort into trying to understand esoteric arcane emacs-only concepts and writing some Elisp. seriously though, it's a rabbit hole. Been there myself, now I just us vscode and it's a breeze!