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>I'm not sure the set of people who care about out of the box and the set of people who would be future maintainers is a very large intersection ... Yeah that'
by nvy 3y ago
>I'm not sure the set of people who care about out of the box and the set of people who would be future maintainers is a very large intersection ...
Yeah that's the common refrain. It's just gatekeeping in my experience. A certain demographic tends to view using the terminal or using bad UIs as some sort of badge of elite status, and sneers at people who want to spend their workday looking at visually-pleasing UIs.
>Also, what is a good out of the box experience for emacs?
Well, a GUI that doesn't look like it's stuck in 1997 for starters. Off the top of my head, handling long lines without chugging, being async/multithreaded so a network request doesn't lock up the entire fscking UI, offering CUA-mode by default for easier onboarding, fixing the often absurd terminology in the docs (frames/windows/panes/yank means paste/etc.), and probably a few others I can't think of.
Have a look here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/userinterface https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/userinterface
That's just an immensely better UI, by default. To achieve even 80% of that in emacs you'd need to spend time configuring at a minimum treemacs, an lsp client, breadcrumb-mode, minimap, probably project.el or projectile, magit, one of the tab-bar modes, and a bunch of niceties like showing line numbers by default, to say nothing about a better theme.
All that stuff should be built in and there's no good reason other than "the emacs developers are overworked already" for them to not be included.
Imagine showing someone the editor above, and then showing them this. Which one do you think they'll choose?
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/images/teaser.png https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/images/teaser.png
It just looks amateurish and unpolished. It looks like it's janky and doesn't work very well. It's just unappealing in any modern sense.
- globular-toast 3y agoI mean the VS Code one looks terrible to me. Fat icons on the left wasting space. Illegible text wasting space on the right. More wasted space in the bottom right. The text doesn't even fit in the buffers?! And this is their marketing shot? I guess that's why I'm not in marketing. Yeah, the Emacs one looks shit. They should definitely expunge those screenshots and replace them with ones that actually look good. It's impossible to convey what makes Emacs great in screenshots, though. It's not the theme, it's not even magit or org-mode. I feel like someone with skills could make a good short video on what actually makes it great. Unfortunately most Emacs users are borderline autistic like me, though. People will always be drawn to flash marketing, that's just the way it is. I still don't get why someone (like you) doesn't just bundle a starter kit and make it easy to install standalone if you think this is the problem. Spacemacs has a shiny website but its installation instructions are `git clone spacemacs ~/.emacs.d` :/
- eviks 3y ago> doesn't just bundle a starter kit because user exposure (discoverability) will be tiny compared to fixing the OOTB in the "official" version
- s17n 3y ago> It just looks amateurish and unpolished. It looks like it's janky and doesn't work very well. It's just unappealing in any modern sense. I was with you before but now I think I might be glad that people like you get ignored by emacs developers. Do you also think that Craigslist looks amateurish, unpolished, and unappealing in any modern sense? I'm all for improving usability (I agree with all the other points you made in this post) but I don't want my software to look "modern", simply because in general, UI design has gotten worse over the last 20 years.