Oddly, I think you will make Emacs appealing to users when you start asserting it is appealing to users. Few changes really needed. Just stop intimidating people before they get involved.
I've worked with a lot of Emacs fans but everyone describes it as having a hefty learning curve. If you tell people it's appealing and the first experience is unpleasant, all you're going to do is convince them that you aren't a reliable source of advice. I think it would be much better to focus on easing that initial stage and explaining it a powerful tool which requires some up-front investment.
And I'm not saying lie. Just stop scaring people away. Emacs is by far one of the most empowering programs out there. Market that.
She realize that it is marketing. You want to build a market of users? You have to have some marketing.
I'm not saying to merely claim it and call it a day. I'm saying claim it while showing people how to use it. Make it a dialog that doesn't begin with, our way is harder. It isn't harder. Just different.
If I start emacs, I can navigate around the text with the arrow keys, the way I would expect from most other text entry systems. Then I can just type stuff. I can click at points in the text to navigate there, just like in notepad or anywhere else.
OTOH in vim it is nothing like that. Nothing is even remotely familiar. Yet there are much more vim users than emacs users. So I don't buy it that the learning curve is the problem.
That’s seriously begging the question — I mean, there’s a pretty popular running joke about quitting vim and it’s been many years since I’ve heard any recommend it as easy to get started with. In the 90s people suggested it due to Emacs hitting memory constraints but most CPUs now have more cache now than those computers had.
The biggest problems with Emacs, to me, are the rendering performance, the lack of sufficient threading, the default keyboard-accessible windowing commands, and Elisp being unergonomic and sad.
The course I'd chart for an ideal Emacs would be rendering with something like Alacritty†, some default windowing commands similar to tmux, and phasing out Elisp in favour of a Clojure dialect; the last bit would help a lot with introducing some basic sources of concurrency.
† Plus smooth scrolling surfaces, since a text editor generally does not have enough surfaces that the memory overhead of tiled surfaces is a serious issue like it is for general-purpose renderers like web browsers.
For instance, the global namespace is great to play with and learn commands in the scratch buffer. Also the custom datastructures and generally the emacs lisp abstractions around editing are a joy to use.
I agree though that the rendering is too old fashioned. I'd love for Emacs to get smooth, animated scrolling instead of that tty-esque line-by-line movement of the text. That really makes it hard to keep track when scrolling throught large documents.
Namespaces for vars and functions being not a language feature is inconvenient. Unless you are using fakespace or intern-symbol (it seems hardly anyone does), every symbol in your program needs to include its namespace information in order to avoid it being accidentally invoked by somebody else, or accidentally convincing somebody that it's part of the base distribution.
In Clojure, it's many little things:
Keywords are callable, allowing you to evaluate a keyword on an associative collection like hash-map, or traverse, in an obvious and intuitive way, into a nested associative structure with the threading macros "->" and "->>".
The default data structures are fast (for what they are) and hard to misuse: unless you ask politely, you are not going to mutate something your function was passed passed without noticing. seq, the interface for sequences (vectors, lists, pairs from an associative structure), pairs well with destructuring in let and macros/syntax that does binding.
Things like 'let' don't use more parentheses than necessary, which has a greater impact on readability than you'd think. The use of vector syntax for bindings rather than list syntax adds a little bit of syntactic texture that makes reading programs more ergonomic.
I think Clojure may not be as unfamiliar as it seems at first to a person who's written other lisps before, but I have yet to meet somebody who prefers the experience of writing Scheme or Common Lisp to Clojure; nor anyone who prefers Elisp to Common Lisp.
;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/gendered-on-ramps-are...
An an occasional user of both Excel and Emacs (mainly a vi guy), I waste at least as much time figuring out where "that tool" in Excel went or how to get in to one of the weird graph editing modes as I do with the more obscure Emacs features I use sometimes.