Re: "Why is emacs so square?"

[Ahmed Khanzada]

On Sat, 18 Apr 2020 16:02:35 -0700,
Stefan Kangas wrote:
> 
> Ahmed Khanzada <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > 1. Terminal-based Vim is not like a modern application, yet is more
> > popular than Emacs.
> 
> How do you know that Vim is more popular than Emacs?
>

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#development-environments-and-tools

Nearly 20% of programmers use vim, and around 3% use Emacs.

Visual Studio Code has 54%.

> > 3. If Emacs was to become a "modern" app tomorrow, an editor extended
> > in Lisp still only has appeal for a minority of programmers
> 
> I think features matters more than extension language to most users.
> For example, the popularity of Vim is unlikely to be based on the
> appeal of an editor extended in Vimscript.

That is fair enough. But for extensible editors, features are built by a
small group of folks interested in that sort of thing. A more
"mainstream" language usually means more extensions which means more features.

> 
> > 4. Most of the push for a "modern look" comes from the desire for Emacs
> > to play more nicely with proprietary platforms.
> 
> Why do you believe that to be the case?

I suppose this is a pure assumption on my part based on my anecdotal
experience. I hear more comments about Emacs not being a nice MacOS or
Windows application than a nice GNOME application, but that is just anecdotal
evidence, and is certainly skewed by the popularity of those platforms.