Emacs is software from the 80s that failed to adapt to the current times.
It failed to innovate and address UX issues so its market share devoured.
It failed to innovate and address UX issues so its market share devoured.
Failing to implement UX fad of the moment means that you can rely on the GUI being consistent across years instead of having to relearn it every few months.
But it does show what software is generally better.
>A thriving ecosystem and active development is.
Despite being thriving it still is very lacking in code navigation abilities and has poor performance in general. Not to mention the editor grinds to a halt when working on big files due to extensions being poorly optimized.
>Failing to implement UX fad of the moment means that you can rely on the GUI being consistent across years instead of having to relearn it every few months.
The user experience of a product is much more than just the user interface. Emacs requires you to learn elisp and write a whole configuration file by hand or use really clunky menus.
Have you not been giving the pep talk, "if everyone jumped off a building...", as kid ?
Usually that talk is nonsense, but not here.
Having said that, "market share" doesn't seem like a relevant metric since the community seems perfectly content being niche.
This is just admitting defeat. There is no reason Emacs couldn't be the number one editor right now. GNU projects in general all tend to fail to innovate and seem to ignore the last couple of decades of learnings.
There is a simple reason for it not to be number one: The developers and users do not care for it to be.
I certainly don't. As long as Emacs has hit critical mass (which it trivially has), it is good enough for me.
The number one selling car is Toyota. You wouldn't go and say Porsche is an inferior product because they are not the number one selling car.
I suspect you're right that under different stewardship Emacs could have taken over the wold. And who knows, if they cared to run usability studies on the initial user experience it might still be possible.
> This is just admitting defeat
If you assume that everyone values popularity or ease-of-use then this is a reasonable conclusion.
But if you'd forgive some unsolicited advice: assuming everyone shares your values will make it hard to understand or predict other people's actions which will hinder your attempts to communicate, negotiate, or manage anyone not like you. It may be simpler to imagine they're crazy, foolish, or deluded but personally I've found it useful to operate under the assumption that their values are real and just as valid as mine.
They should care about it. Losing market share means people are finding more value in other editors. Do the developers not want Emacs to give the most value as possible to users?
some people just dont get it. emacs is not an editor :)
They clearly do not.