Re: Making Emacs more friendly to newcomers

[Po Lu]

Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> writes:


> And then, another 20 years pass, the current users get too old/change
> careers/retire/etc, and Emacs's userbase shrinks even more.

I have seen people say Emacs will die by 2000 in the 90s.
I've also seen people say Emacs will die by 2010 in the 2000s.
I've also seen people say Emacs will die by 2020 in the 2010s.

Since all of those predictions of doom have consistently failed, I'm not
inclined to believe any of this either.

> I don't want Emacs to die out, and it will if we don't do the work of
> attracting new users.

And we're attracting a fair amount of new users.  What I would hate to
see is Emacs prioritizing "attracting users" over "being useful".  I'm
sure many in the community agree with me.

> Also note that we don't really have the ability to poll even our
> existing users, to find out whether they would like a given
> change. Even disregarding those who would change their mind later.

The anecdotal experience of many people I know (and I'm sure many people
on this list too) would agree that drastic changes are a bad thing.

> Give it time.

Also, Xref was actually useful in a way.  Drastic redesigning just to
attract new users does not.


> I think it's possible to support two sets of keybindings. That's
> definitely extra work, though.

We already have Cua Mode.  Having a button on the splash screen that
says "enable Cua" should be enough.

> Including simply designing a set of bindings that is both compatible
> with CUA and yet retains the current design principles to some extent 
> (so far I have no good ideas on that front).

I don't think that's possible, at least without 20 years advance notice.