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Meet your users where they are is great advice for consumer apps you want people to onboard to quickly and the users only interact with them periodiclly. We're

Meet your users where they are is great advice for consumer apps you want people to onboard to quickly and the users only interact with them periodiclly. We're talking about the power tools of our profession. Nobody designs a band-saw to meet their users where they are either. These are apps we spend 8hrs+ per day living in, and frankly the buffer wording is superior because a buffer is not a file, but a file is in a buffer. Meeting your users where they are is how we got everybody moving from Textmate to Atom and now to VSCode as the new hotness that would finally kill Emacs and vi. And yet that's the mentality that prevented those newer editors from having the legs to really last. Meanwhile other power tools like Eclipse which absolutely meet nobody where they are are going strong too.

bitwize 6y ago
> Meeting your users where they are is how we got everybody moving from Textmate to Atom and now to VSCode as the new hotness that would finally kill Emacs and vi. And yet that's the mentality that prevented those newer editors from having the legs to really last. I'd like to think that too, but the sad fact is that most developers these days use VSCode. It is the new hotness that killed Emacs and vi. Emacs and vi are both mere footnotes compared to VSCode in terms of market and mind share, and even Eclipse has been largely supplanted within its niche by the far easier IntelliJ suite. I suppose vi and Emacs will be around as long as they have diehards still using them, but they're not capturing new users' hearts and minds like they used to. Most professional developers I've met hear Emacs and think it's something that last ran on dusty old DEC iron -- and that includes people who worked at DEC in the 80s! The fact that Emacs is still maintained and runs on modern systems came as a genuine surprise to them. Emacs and vi held on for as long as they did because there was a significant contingent of developers and technical people still familiar with a traditional Unix environment up until the 2000s or so. As some of these people aged out of the work force, they were replaced by an even larger contingent of younger developers, who only ever grew up with Windows and Mac, and have a reasonable expectation that programs work the Windows and Mac way. By and large they don't even have much interest in Linux on the desktop. Linux is for servers/the cloud. Their dev workstation is a Mac. And Emacs and vi are relics from the before times, whose 1970s UIs just aren't worth grappling with because there are better options available. Those are the people Emacs has to reach if it is to stay relevant. Which means that one way or another it will be "modernized" whether we like it or not.
- skissane 6y ago
  > Emacs and vi are both mere footnotes compared to VSCode in terms of market and mind share According to StackOverflow's 2019 developer survey [0], 50.7% of editors used VSCode, 25.4% used Vim. So that doesn't really support your claim that vi is a "mere footnote". 25% of market share isn't 50%, but it is still decent and more than a mere "footnote". [0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-environments-and-tools https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e...
  - blacktriangle 6y ago
    Wow even Emacs doing better than I would have thought at 4.5%. People overestimate the value of massive community and apply a winner takes all mentality too often. You don't need a giant community, and almost by definition giant communities tend to have a lower average user quality leading to lower quality of libraries and support (looking at you JS ecosystem).
    - anthk 6y ago
      This. And those Mac zealot Gen-Zers know shit about what happened in late 90's and early 00's where people used vim and Emacs like Crazy, specially under X because Emacs were really affordable and fast under a mouse while keeping keyboard bindings. They think the world revolutes around them with JS and hip editors while in the end they are the utter minority in serious IT/dev environments.
- anthk 6y ago
  >Most professional developers I've met hear Emacs and think it's something that last ran on dusty old DEC iron -- and that includes people who worked at DEC in the 80s! The fact that Emacs is still maintained and runs on modern systems came as a genuine surprise to them. Bullshit, a lot of Linux/Unix developers used Emacs in the 90's and early OO's. I was there.

bitwize 6y ago

> Meeting your users where they are is how we got everybody moving from Textmate to Atom and now to VSCode as the new hotness that would finally kill Emacs and vi. And yet that's the mentality that prevented those newer editors from having the legs to really last. I'd like to think that too, but the sad fact is that most developers these days use VSCode. It is the new hotness that killed Emacs and vi. Emacs and vi are both mere footnotes compared to VSCode in terms of market and mind share, and even Eclipse has been largely supplanted within its niche by the far easier IntelliJ suite. I suppose vi and Emacs will be around as long as they have diehards still using them, but they're not capturing new users' hearts and minds like they used to. Most professional developers I've met hear Emacs and think it's something that last ran on dusty old DEC iron -- and that includes people who worked at DEC in the 80s! The fact that Emacs is still maintained and runs on modern systems came as a genuine surprise to them. Emacs and vi held on for as long as they did because there was a significant contingent of developers and technical people still familiar with a traditional Unix environment up until the 2000s or so. As some of these people aged out of the work force, they were replaced by an even larger contingent of younger developers, who only ever grew up with Windows and Mac, and have a reasonable expectation that programs work the Windows and Mac way. By and large they don't even have much interest in Linux on the desktop. Linux is for servers/the cloud. Their dev workstation is a Mac. And Emacs and vi are relics from the before times, whose 1970s UIs just aren't worth grappling with because there are better options available. Those are the people Emacs has to reach if it is to stay relevant. Which means that one way or another it will be "modernized" whether we like it or not.

skissane 6y ago
> Emacs and vi are both mere footnotes compared to VSCode in terms of market and mind share According to StackOverflow's 2019 developer survey [0], 50.7% of editors used VSCode, 25.4% used Vim. So that doesn't really support your claim that vi is a "mere footnote". 25% of market share isn't 50%, but it is still decent and more than a mere "footnote". [0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-environments-and-tools https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-e...
- blacktriangle 6y ago
  Wow even Emacs doing better than I would have thought at 4.5%. People overestimate the value of massive community and apply a winner takes all mentality too often. You don't need a giant community, and almost by definition giant communities tend to have a lower average user quality leading to lower quality of libraries and support (looking at you JS ecosystem).
  - anthk 6y ago
    This. And those Mac zealot Gen-Zers know shit about what happened in late 90's and early 00's where people used vim and Emacs like Crazy, specially under X because Emacs were really affordable and fast under a mouse while keeping keyboard bindings. They think the world revolutes around them with JS and hip editors while in the end they are the utter minority in serious IT/dev environments.
anthk 6y ago
>Most professional developers I've met hear Emacs and think it's something that last ran on dusty old DEC iron -- and that includes people who worked at DEC in the 80s! The fact that Emacs is still maintained and runs on modern systems came as a genuine surprise to them. Bullshit, a lot of Linux/Unix developers used Emacs in the 90's and early OO's. I was there.