Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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When reading this article, I think there is an interesting parallel to be made with Firefox.

Emacs has questionable technical underpinnings. It is an old project; they've all learned a lot since the 1970s. ELisp wouldn't be built that way today, it wouldn't be written in C, it'd be designed with keybindings for a modern keyboard - probably cloning vim. Break from Emacs tradition and build something that is good at editing text maybe.

Firefox faced a similar challenge from modernity with changing security and performance demands. But they chose to remove XUL killed off their own extension ecosystem and put them in a permanent "Chrome but worse" category that they have been unable to escape from.

In some ways it is impressive that Emacs has managed to avoid being killed off in a massive rewrite attempting to chase other text editors. The temptation much be there, it has a lot of deficiencies. But it is a unique and rewarding piece of software for anyone who wants what it does.

> it'd be designed with keybindings for a modern keyboard - probably cloning vim.

Or not. This is something some have a hard time understanding, but some of us prefer a non-modal editor and like having simpler key chords instead of key sequences. After all, vi isn't that much younger than Emacs, and the technical underpinnings of its command language are just about as old as the oldest versions of TECO Emacs. My point is that the difference between vi-style keystrokes and Emacs-style is a matter of taste.

Bill Joy, maker of Vi, was rather impressed by Emacs's input model in fact:

> I think one of the interesting things is that vi is really a mode-based editor. I think as mode-based editors go, it pretty good. One of the good things about EMACS, though, is its programmability and the modelessness. Those are two ideas which never occurred to me.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060701083055/http://web.cecs.p...

I am used to Emacs's parallel universe of keyboard shortcuts now, but I think you could make a good Emacs using standard Windows keybinds.

> This is something some have a hard time understanding, but some of us prefer a non-modal editor and like having simpler key chords instead of key sequences.

I'll second this.

I literally grew up on VI - my dad installed it with UNIX tools on the family 486 running MS-DOS. Then I dedicated a week to learning Emacs around the turn of the century, and I've never looked back.

To be sure, I still whip out vim for quick editing of remote server config files and it's my editor in mutt. But there's just so much power in emacs - I'm reminded of Vivek Halder's "Levels of Emacs Proficiency"[0], and the fact I do most everything in Emacs these days (I live in org-mode, play music in EMMS, run git through EGG, etc, etc). It's hard to think of anything with this level of consistency of keybindings, nor something that does so many things I need to do.

[0] - https://www.vivekhaldar.com/articles/the-levels-of-emacs-pro...

> In some ways it is impressive that Emacs has managed to avoid being killed off in a massive rewrite attempting to chase other text editors.

No point chasing when you’re the leader.

It would have to happen in a fork, and a fork attempting it would run into all the problems Richard Stallman identifies when these things are proposed (and rejected). It’s not like they’re unaware that some decades old critical components need to be redone. But this is emacs, not a FAANG throwaway, so that kind of work has constraints and expectations and standards to meet. Chunking garbage at it because emotions isn’t an option there.

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