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Comment by throwaway_pdp09 | Hacker News Reader

There's some bad stuff in emacs but to concern yourself with Meta as opposed to M- is plain silly.

> if you can make a tool more learnable for new users without sacrificing its optimization for power users, you should

Yes, but it's incredibly difficult and frankly the emacs devs have enough to do (and they do it well), and UI design is a very different skillset from programming. Frankly the learning curve for emacs is not going to improve, muchas we both might wish it.

The biggest problem is people want the benefits of freely downloadable software but mainly aren't prepared to give anything back. Go and assist with emacs or some other project.

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> The biggest problem is people want the benefits of freely downloadable software but mainly aren't prepared to give anything back. Go and assist with emacs or some other project.

I don't really buy this line of argument in general, but I think Josh is a particularly poor candidate to pull rank on because they don't contribute to open source. I don't know Josh, but I recognize his name from his open source contributions.

If you don't recognize Josh's name, you can get an idea of some of what he's done from his website, which is linked in his bio: https://joshtriplett.org/

> I work on Linux, primarily on the RCU subsystem and on Sparse-related code. I maintain the rcutorture test module.

> I co-maintain the X C Binding (XCB). I developed the XML-XCB format to describe the X Window System protocol. I also work on other Xorg projects on Freedesktop.org.

> I maintained the Sparse semantic parser and static analysis tool for C for several years, before passing it on to Christopher Li.

> I maintain several packages in the Debian project.

Consider me very regretful indeed. Most people who moan seem to have nothing to contribute, well I got it very wrong this time. Apologies to @JoshTriplett if you're reading this, and Ill check out your stuff tomorrow.

Ah shit, I recognise your name too. I've just been spanked by Dan Luu. This has not been a good night.

I appreciate the sentiment. I would gently suggest focusing the regret on the message rather than the recipient; it wouldn't have been better if written to a novice user.

Heh. My website is drastically outdated (by a decade), but thank you nonetheless.

> it's incredibly difficult

Right. I see this point ignored very frequently (sometimes because it's obvious and sometimes because people are being dumb).

A lot of the things that would make emacs more like other editors are extremely difficult to retrofit. I expect there is still SOME low-hanging fruit, but a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, and a lot of the remaining changes that people would like are a lot of work.

Let's discuss that. Emacs is so flexible it should be possible to do anything. Binding cut/copy/paste functionality to the conventional keys would be trivial. A few rebound key bindings, not a problem, so you're getting at something larger; what is it?

BTW the current key bindings are so good because I can do a lot without my hands leaving the keyboard, or even moving off the home keys. That was the very point of choosing them originally AFAIK. I recall learning these new keys many years ago, it was surprisingly fast and when I'd learnt them, amazingly quick to sink into muscle memory.

Unfortunately the rest of the software world settled on keybindings for cut and copy that generate almost the greatest possible pain for Emacs to migrate to them. C-c and C-x are used for dozens of the most important commands. It's technically feasible, but switching would be hard and existing users would be really upset.

I assure you I'd never propose to change emacs bindings at all, merely have a switchable alternate set. I think that would be possible? But even if you did so, there's too much else, far deeper that couldn't be amended. I think we agree it's not a credible proposition. I suspect emacs' enormous toolkit can't be exposed consistently without making it inconsistent. I can live with emacs as it is, very happily.

I misread what you were saying, sorry. Too late to delete other post, please ignore it.

> Go and assist with emacs

I have a freaking book to write...

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