If you could change one thing about Emacs what would it be?

What platform do you use it on? My default install has a GTK menu bar, tool bar and scrollbars, as well as windows that can be resized by mouse.

This is why I like it. If it had all that junk, people would use it. The whole point is that everything in it is text, so you can treat everything the same. If you want a checkbox, you get some text. Widget? Some text. You have literally every other tool if you want dialog boxes flying in your face.

I think there is some work done with the pure gtk branch. Some context can be found here [1].

[1] https://deathwish.info/2020/08/01/pgtk-nativecomp/

That would complicate hot-reloading though. Currently you can just modify a function and reload it by re-executing its defun. If you implement smarter namespacing, reloading it would require knowing what namespace it belongs to. You'd have to do the modification in the original file instead of anywhere (like the *stratch* buffer), or put the modified definition in some kind of construct that specifies the namespace it belongs to.

Also, finding the documentation and definition of a given symbol under the cursor would also get more complicated.

Having everything in one global namespace has its perks.

Guile Scheme would be great for this purpose.

Are we talking about GNU Emacs then? There seem to be a few Emacs or Emacs-like editors in various state of completion / deterioration implemented in CL. Hemlock comes to mind and Climacs.

For as much as I like the grand dame of programming languages, I don't think it would be the best substitute for Emacs Lisp. CL is a fairly large language and takes considerably time to learn. An unnecessary burden for someone just wanting to customizes his/her editor. Further, an Emacs in CL obviously requires a CL interpreter/compiler. I'm afraid this limits portability as e.g. SBCL, arguably the best open source CL compiler, supports only a handful of environments. CLISP was pretty portable, but the project seems dead.

I'm sure, if today (or twenty years ago) GNU Emacs would be written, Guile might be chosen as implementation / extension language.

Evil mode?

> _Ensure that etags is compulsorily bundled with emacs, I am remembering that in a few distro's etags missing despite installing the emacs package._

My understanding is that Exuberant Ctags provides an etags binary, as well, and you're likely to want to use it as it supports more languages. Maybe Debian (and its derivatives) can make use of the "alternatives" system to redirect etags to the "best" installed version. Or the one the user prefers :-)

> Have a dual pane file manager built in. Dired seems design for single pane operation.

You _can_ use dired like midnight commander.

See the tutorial http://emacsrocks.com/e16.html

This is actually an amazing talk[1] about doing voice coding in Emacs, over 8 years ago.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI

Ouch.

Do you have the same problem on old.reddit.com?

I’d be happy if the existing bindings just behaved closer to how they do in vim. As with all vim binding plugins there’s always slight differences that drive muscle memory mad.