Re: How to make Emacs popular again [or less square].

[Po Lu]

James Lu <jamtlu@gmail.com> writes:

> I am a new (2020 started) Emacs user. 

Welcome to the club.

> Sell customer support packages, so
> 1) You can focus on gaining users = giving more users computer user
> freedom and user empowerment.

There are a few GNU projects that actually do this, usually by
outsourcing the support to a separate organization or having the
maintainer provide support himself (notably Octave and GNAT), but for a
pretty complicated set of reasons I don't really think this can apply to
Emacs, which AFAIK is not employed in any large commercial context, or
used by the sort of people who are actually interested in expensive
support packages.

> 2) You can better understand the problems with Emacs' documentation
> and user interface because people will email you support questions on
> them, incentivizing you to reduce how many support queries are needed.
> User experience testing. a la Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug.  Path
> dependence-- sequence points
> matter. https://kwokchain.com/2020/06/19/why-figma-wins/

There was another thread talking about this from a while back (feel free
to search 'Why is Emacs so square?' in the mailing list archives), which
did actually talk about some user experience improvements.  Some of the
ideas were fairly good (such as improving the appalling icons in gud.el,
suggesting packages when opening various files), while others were not
really practical (for instance drastically changing the defaults, and
moving the existing defaults to a "vanilla-mode").  It would be a
terrible waste of time if that particular discussion was repeated here.