Re: An anonymous IRC user's opinion

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

Hi Eduardo,

Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> writes:

> Yes! To be honest Anonymous's proposal doesn't make much sense to
> me... for example, this,
>
>> Without the user having to know about init file, packages, archives,
>> functions, variables, hooks, and endless init file debugging, or even
>> to write a single line of elisp.
>>
>> Users can be from different backgrounds not necessary hackers or
>> developers.
>
> that gives me the impression that Anynymous thinks that people should
> configure their Emacs first and learn "the rest" later, and that that
> would work very well.

I think they have a point with that. The success of Doom¹ and Spacemacs²
(to my impression many of the new Emacs users in the past decade came
from these) suggests that many users need something that just solves
their current requirements.

Besides having pretty readable online-documentation (with Doom simply
using what github provides), they mostly provide “what is your task? I
will make it work well and look good.”³

¹ https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs
² https://www.spacemacs.org/
³ https://www.spacemacs.org/layers/LAYERS.html#programming-and-markup-languages

But even these are still far too much for casual users — even casual
programmers. Configuring anything before being able to start is often
too much. The JetBrains (IntelliJ) page shows what 

And most current tools are available as curl-bash (curl script from
maybe trusted source and execute it without inspection).

A writer friend of mine (also build system engineer) spent months
collecting neat adjustments to create the perfect writing environment.
That worked, because org already provides much out of the box.

So some way of making custom emacs setups provide the UX of installing a
regular application might actually bring more users.

I’m not sure whether that’s actually the best approach for Emacs, but
something to reduce the friction of getting an emacs setup optimized to
a given task to almost zero would likely be a valuable improvement.

> understand... and at that point we can plonk them, but we will have
> the code for (1), (2), (3), and (4), and that can be useful in the
> future...
>
>   (Slightly bitter) cheers,
>     Eduardo

Please try to keep bitterness off list. I understand the sentiment, but
the times I gave in to bittereness or cynicism myself, it always hit the
wrong people, scaring active new contributors away from the project
(whom I later saw contributing constructively to other projects).

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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