Re: How to make Emacs popular again.

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 26.09.2020 17:53, Ergus wrote:

> BUT, on the other hand, it is true that Emacs makes some simple things
> more complex/weird and keep them like that just because "it is the emacs
> way" or "not to bother old users" or "we shouldn't do that just because
> others do" or "our way is better just 90% more complex because it covers
> this very weird and infrequent use case".

Very much yes.

It's very discouraging to see the constant push-back against even the 
small and reasonable changes.

It feels like everybody who is not content with Emacs remaining a fringe 
quirky editor simply has to leave (*), sooner or later. And thus the 
development team self-selects in favor of individuals who don't care 
much about the programs around Emacs (and being at least somewhat 
compatible with them in the UI), or general usability concerns.

(*) The core development, at least. Or they go and create their own 
sub-community (like "starter packs", or the lsp-mode project), 
contributing very little outside of it because of the much higher 
friction that entails.