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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Does this look like 1978 to you? <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/>

I love Emacs, and while that tour doesn't quite look 1978, it sure doesn't look 2026 either. Maybe somewhere in the middle.. yup, 2002 seems about right.

And for some reason, most of the screenshots on that page are in super low res, e.g. I see https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/images/gnus-small.pn... instead of https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/images/gnus.png , I really don't see why they'd want to make it look even worse.

And then on the other hand you have people like Nicolas Rougier https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fp... or Álvaro Ramírez https://xenodium.com/awesome-emacs-on-macos who show how great it can really look.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind old aesthetics, but... yes? Well I wasn't exactly alive in 1978 but all the screenshots look like they are at least 20 years old

Firstly, the original comment was about UI rather than aesthetics. Secondly, as with everything else in Emacs, you can customise the appearance however you want. Those screenshots are from vanilla Emacs which is admittedly rather ugly. Most people heavily customise, or use an Emacs distro like Spacemacs (https://www.spacemacs.org/) or Doom (https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs?tab=readme-ov-file) which have more sensible default appearance configs.

20 years ago was in 2006, not 1978.

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