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A new user perspective about "Changes for emacs 28"
From: |
Nicola Manca |
Subject: |
A new user perspective about "Changes for emacs 28" |
Date: |
Mon, 7 Sep 2020 18:45:59 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.12.0 |
Dear Emacs Developers,
I'm probably one of the newest emacs users in thin ML, I started using
it since about one year. I decided to write this email hoping that my
opinion as a "new emacs user" could add something to the ongoing
discussion about emacs defaults.
I started using debian at high school, 20 year ago, as my only
operative system. This mainly for political agreement with the free
software movement. Since then I tried to start using emacs several
times, but I always gave up, despite my motivation towards free software
in general.
Today I'm not a programmer, I'm a scientist and I never understood why I
should spend time learning to use a software that I could barely shuth
down (typically with a "pkill -9 emacs"). Last year a friend of mine
spent few hours convincing me that emacs worth another try. He explained
me the logic of keybinding (Meta is Alt, really?!?) and then the
org-mode was the game-changing feature. I then did the tutorial a couple
of times, copied something from his .emacs and then moved to
stackexchange or reddit to look for more. First, I installed
org-superstar, to have nice bullets, and then
learned how to change the default theme to dark one with decent
contrast and colors (sanityinc-tomorrow-night). Yes, sorry, I have to
tell you that these are the priority for a new user: feel comfortable,
so that he/she is motivated to spend time in something...
Now I use emacs on a daily basis. My .emacs is about 500 lines,
similarly to my TODO.org. By spending a non-negligible amount of time I
managed to have a python environment comparable to other graphical
editors (Spyder) and latex nicely configured in a similar way to
TexStudio. I even manage to have two dictionaries working together
thanks to a discussion in this ML, super cool!
However, how many people have the opportunity and the will to spend tens
of ours to just do in emacs what they already did in texstudio or
spyder? I don't know if cry or laugh when I read that switching to a
dark theme is a "radical change". I would love to see much more radical
changes. There are a lot of low-hanging fruit that could make emacs
appealing for new users and provide the enthusiasm required to overcome
its steep learning curve.
These are just the first examples that came up in my mind:
- undo-tree-mode
- which-key-mode
- beacon-mode
- ido-mode (everywhere)
- helm-M-x
I'm aware that there are probably copyright or technical problems to
make these defaults (together with a nice shiny theme). However, this
should be the main objective of the development activity. In particular
packages as WK or helm-M-x are very good for learning keystrokes. Humans
learn by trials and errors, not by reading the manual, and these
packages are great for this.
I bealive that the final goal should alwasy be to attract new users,
otherwise non-free software will always have a larger userbase. So far,
I've not the technical skills to do this, maybe someone out there can
and want. However, my feeling is that there is not much push in this
direction (maybe in the opposite) and this may results in lack of
enthusiasm.
I want to thank Ergus for trying, and all the developers for the great
software. May it become even better!
best wishes
Nicola