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Yeah I think this is on point. The core maintainers are always kind of resisting changing things to more sane defaults, which is a pity.

I recently had the experience of a friend of mine, a data scientist, tell me he tried to use emacs but just couldn’t get it to work. When I asked how he installed it, he was like “well I just downloaded it, and started tinkering a bit with my config”. After which he just ditched it, he accepted that the learning curve was just to steep.

The idea that there are these whole starter packs never crossed his mind. I referred him to a few, and he suddenly got much more productive and has been a happy emacs user ever since.

Moral of the story: at the very least, users should be made aware of these starter packs much more prominently when downloading or installing emacs. Alternatively, fix the defaults.

A little messaging about starter-pack options, in the default welcome screens, would go a long way.

Great. Now where is the starter pack. Better with some lisp in a box etc. as well. I use lisp download with Mac because at least the key I know of. No strange key combination.

I'm sorry, I don't understand the point that you're trying to make?

I don't know dude, I've had new grads recently wholesale switch to Emacs just after watching me work for five minutes. "Holy crap, why are you editing these programs so much faster than me?"

Completely agree that out-of-the-box Emacs experience is NOT where it's at. I have twenty years invested in tweaking it to minimize keystrokes and operate faster for my use cases. Just remember that Emacs is not actually an editor, it's a Lisp Machine OS you can use to build an editor out of parts

Also keep in mind that alternate distros like Spacemacs are the way Emacs has to evolve, because making drastic structural changes to defaults would break so many user scripts and packages -- the things that provide most of the long-term value proposition of using Emacs in the first place.

Who cares if new people use it or if it looks modern? It’s working well for the people who want it. Not every piece of software has to be everything to everyone.

Well I care, and so should anyone who would like to see Emacs live on for another 40 years. There will be major new areas of innovation, that will require massive amounts of work, and without an energetic and large community Emacs will not be able to adapt.

Well, as sad as it is for someone like me, who lives and breathes Emacs, there are already signs showing. There's still no decent support for C++, even in community. If you have a patience to bash together a number of elisp packages and write some extra config to paper over the idiosyncrasies of your project, then sure, you'll get something mostly working. But then just downloading Visual Studio will get you 90% there.

There's support for language servers (and I consider the existence of LSP to be a new hope for Emacs and Vim to stay relevant in the future), but it's arguably so-so.

As good as the Emacs community is, it still has pretty limited amount of time and manpower to throw at problems. I feel the wider development world starts to outpace this capacity.

> There will be major new areas of innovation

I’m really curious what you mean by that, and how you see the world evolving such that Emacs, as is, won’t be able to come along with it.

Imagine a world where your terminal isn’t emulating a TTY from fifty years ago. Gary Bernhardt gave a talk about this in 2012[0].

[0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world

Pretty cool talk! I love some of the features he's added!

https://imgur.com/Gtytll1

An interesting thing that often gets forgotten or missed is that Emacs doesn't depend on a conventional TTY to run. It's already capable of displaying images either in separate buffers or inline.

From Gary's talk there, my thoughts would be that a number of the features he's put in there would:

a) be potentially better-served as CLI tools instead of baked directly into the IDE, with well-defined inputs and outputs. I have no problem imagining use cases for e.g. the crash navigation stuff outside of an editor (perhaps as part of an error-handling dashboard).

b) likely already be possible to build in non-terminal versions of Emacs, without having to design your own terminal and editor from scratch.

By no means do I think Emacs is a perfect editor, but I'm also very cautious when pondering "do we rebuild from scratch"-type questions. I'm always keeping my eye on other editors and IDEs, and with varying levels of difficulty, I haven't really come across too many useful things that wouldn't be possible to do within the current Emacs/Elisp environment. Awkward, maybe.

It’s not that black and white. A simple hint when installing or downloading, “hey did you know that there are these starter packs?” would already do wonders.

It’s not that people are suggesting emacs tries to be everything to everyone; heck, by pure virtue of its extensibility, emacs is actually the one editor that could potentially be everything to everyone. But a simple startup screen, “hey, it looks like this is your first time using emacs. what kind of defaults would you like?” would do wonders and existing users would be entirely unaffected.

> A simple hint when installing or downloading, “hey did you know that there are these starter packs?” would already do wonders.

Automating the Starter-Pack-Installation at virgin start and adding one or two out of the box would be better. Many people are not downloading emacs directly. On Linux you go through your destribution.

If new people don't use it, both its user base and developer list will monotonically decrease until both reach zero which may happen sooner than it could've been otherwise.

I think that's okay. I see that many younger colleagues and friends no longer use Emacs or Vim, preferring editors with Textmate heritage (sublime, vs code and so on).

I think the middle ground during the transition would be the worst of both worlds and there is no shame to no longer be on the top if the times change.

> That's great and all, but people who are learning emacs for the first time don't know or care that it's one of the most successful text editors or that it's been around for 40 years

I don't think this is true. In fact, I think most people that start in Emacs do so because they've heard that old experts use it, and know they will have to put some effort in to understand why.

> That's great and all, but people who are learning emacs for the first time don't know or care that it's one of the most successful text editors or that it's been around for 40 years. They care about being able to write code effectively.

I started using Emacs ~2008 and it's longevity has been a major factor in my decision, as I thought it would likely be usable for the next 30 years as well and help me to avoid changing environments every few years with each new hype.

Later I found a talk which expresses the same sentiment in it's title: "The Editor of a Lifetime" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VADudzQGvU8&t=1823s

I don't think nice color schemes are the point - although I do highly appreciate them.

I've tried Spacemacs and it's pretty nice. Using it in vi-mode, it provides multicursors that are far more advanced than in any other editor I know. Also it has a sidebar.

On the other hand for me Spacemacs is pretty buggy (macOS + Linux), I sometimes have to redo commands. Some important vim shortcuts are not implemented and the sidebar is also not always working as it should. Therefore I refrain from adding more plugins to the mix.

Experienced Emacs tend to not use the Spacemacs theme and are working with solid configurations. Maybe a rock-solid default configuration would work.

Doom emacs is probably the state of the art emacs starter pack now. A lot faster than spacemacs, more stable etc.

A rock solid default config made out of Doom emacs might work.

I don't think a starter pack that completely disables the "Customize" interface would be a good candidate for default.

https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs/blob/a2a5038b970df20e...

"Doom doesn't support `customize' and it never will. It's a clumsy interface"

I find the Customize interface very useful.

Yeah, unfortunately doom isn’t designed to be beginner friendly. I’m personally in two minds about customize. It is quite clunky and I think it’s too easy to have your customisations overwritten by customise or something else or to have them overwritten in confusing ways. But it also gives a non-lisp interface to a lot of customisation (manually setting up the data structures can be a big pain to get right without it).

I'd also say it's a good choice for beginners. Providing one way to configure things and explaining that reasonably well in tutorials and docs is fine. The only downside of Doom Emacs for a beginner like me is the non-standard package manager: Just following some packages docs for configuring isn't enough, it's also required to figure out when to execute that config code.

It's easier this way for a beginner. Things are consistent; You put `(setq foo bar)` in your config. It's very intuitive. (I have also lost some settings to customize's bugs in Spacemacs.)

And how do you arrive at the correct values for 'foo' and 'bar'?. The key feature of customize is discoverability.

When you use the customize interface you sacrifice proper version control.

Bad idea.

You can include custom-file in version control easily enough.

Then the solution is to just point people to some of the popular starter packs when emacs starts for the first few times. I think Doom is pretty rad by default.