Re: Efforts to attract more users?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Adrian Robert writes:

 > For that matter, why is VIM popular?  I've never seen how the
 > weird, line-oriented, moded editing style has anything to compare
 > in ease of use or simplicitly to learn with emacs, yet developer
 > after developer uses it as their "second choice or remote" editor
 > -- while considering emacs "too hard" or "too complicated".  (?)

I've never heard "too hard" or "too complicated".  What I hear a lot
is that Emacsen take too long to start, or at least they did when
those guys started using vi(m).  OTOH, most of the folks I know who
use vi don't use vim, they use nvi or elvis or something like that.

The other thing a lot of people complain about is Emacs regexps (why,
I'm not sure, they're mostly the same as vim's!), and the fact that
there's no regexp search on a short key sequence.  Yes, I know about
C-u C-s; the point is that they don't find out until well after
they've chosen a different editor.

I think an incremental re-search with pcre would be a killer feature
for newbies, but what do I know? ;-)