Re: Changes for emacs 28

[Ergus]

There will be never an agreement about changing defaults with long
standing users. (I can't understand the strong feeling about that
because some/most of the choices we have today were actually determined
by historic/technological conditions more than user preferences)

So what if:

Could we provide a simple command line option like "emacs -m" (or any
letter not in use) which automatically loads a set of extra
"experimental" defaults not suitable for older users?? (the same as
emacs -l modern.el but shorter) Like a different theme, line numbers,
show-paren mode, and any other "modern" feature a newbie expects in a
2020 editor?

We can also provide a .desktop only for it and equivalents to make it
easier to find for new users. And recommend the users to add an alias if
they like to set it as default? and add a note in the welcome screen.

Is this also too crazy?

Probably this features will be trivial for us, but not for anyone
opening emacs for the first time. I am just talking about enabling some
features we already have in vanilla, but they are "hidden"; this is not
doing a complex configs or so.

Alternatively the user will have a copy of this file ready to copy in
his home and personalize as he prefers. So he will have something
"official" to start with; instead of coping random potentially
outdated/problematic configs from internet.

Does this makes sense?

On Sun, Sep 06, 2020 at 08:49:25PM +0000, Andrea Corallo via Emacs development 
discussions. wrote:
> IMO our ultimate goal should be bringing more people into Emacs, GNU, and
> Free Software.  As many as we can I'd say.
>
> I fear pleasing ourselves with a nostalgic toy may not be most effective
> strategy there.
>
> Thanks Ergus, FWIW I support your points.
>
>  Andrea