RE: [External] : Re: PROPOSAL: Repurpose one key and reserve it for third-party packages

[Drew Adams]

> > the difference is that Emacs is a interactive computing environment
> > while GIMP and browsers are programs with extension models.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand the difference, and for
> most users Emacs is not an "interactive computing
> environment", it's a text editor, like Atom,
> Visual Studio, or Vim.

When speaking for, or about, "most users" of Emacs,
it would help to show some justification.

If you mean only that this is your personal
sense/impression/idea about what most Emacs users
think or how they act, then it's fine as is (but
it's better to explicitly say that).

More importantly:  Even if what you say were true,
that doesn't mean that that's what Emacs is _for_.

Emacs, like everything else, is really _for_
whatever you can do with it - whatever you can use
it for in a handy way.  And in the case of Emacs
that's a _lot_ more than what the typical text
editor offers.

We started with a Lisp-based text editor with freely
available source code, and we ended up with, well,
a super-powerful black hole. ;-)

Any description of Emacs includes features such as
extensibility, introspection, access to all source
code, etc.  It's really not a "regular" text editor,
and from that _it follows_ that its users are not
regular editor users (regardless of how many might
take advantage of the features that make it special,
and regardless of how deeply they take advantage of
those features).

> > It's ultimately up to the user what he or she
> > wants to do, and clever behind-your-back
> > customization seems more harmful and confusing
> > than the current state of affairs.
> 
> It's what most users expect.

See above.  Talk of "what most users expect" cries
out for (1) justification (how do you know?) and
(2) relevance (how important is what most expect
at the outset, if you're talking about new users?)