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[[!meta title="M-x Forever: Why Emacs will outlast text editor trends"]]
[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2021 David Wilson"]]
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# M-x Forever: Why Emacs will outlast text editor trends
David Wilson
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The computer software industry has seen many "popular" text editors come
and go, often due to the mercurial fashions of software development. In
this talk, we'll take a look at why popular editors fade and the
specific aspects of Emacs that will ensure it remains relevant
regardless of mainstream popularity.
# Discussion
Pad:
- Q1: In your opinion, what is Emacs achilles heel? It's obviously a powerful tool, but no tool is perfect. What would make your life easier in day to day use with Emacs (either a package you wish existed, or a core Emacs infrastructure change).
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q2:Comparing Emacs just to *code* editors is not a good measure as Emacs is so much more; GTD, word processor, (reference) organizer, or recently expressed on reddit as being a text productivity platform.
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q3: What is your opinion about the documentation of Emacs in another language in addition of english. There aren't too much non-english community. The people from another non-english countries should write documentation in own language or in english?
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q4: Do you think more effort should be made to popularize hacking on the C-parts of Emacs? It seems that this is the achilles-heal for the the long-term maintainance of Emacs, if less and less people understand what is going on underneeth eval and apply.
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q5: Can you name a couple or a few features from other programming languages that you miss in Emacs Lisp?
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q6: A lot of people take issue with Emacs commitment to to Free Software. They claim it holds it back, and that it should be more "pragmatic". What are your oppinions on this?
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q7: Do you think that packages like Magit or Org-Mode make people see Emacs as an obstacle to these applications they want to use? Is this an issue, or should it be seen as an opportunity to teach them about Emacs/Free Software?
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q8: Should Emacs continue to present itself as a esotetic program and culture? Or should we try to dispell the myth, and make clear that anyone can use it, not just extreem entusiasts? Or is this needed to motiviate people to invest time into properly learning Emacs?
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q9: Do you think there could be changes made to the core of Emacs that would betray the ethos you (and most people here) appriciate? I am thinking of points that some of Emacs' critics demand, to allegedly make Emacs more popular. Do you think this is a realistic threat, or could we save ourselves by forking?
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q10: The kids want to know : when an ongoing joint video collaboration between @daviwil and @protesilaos?
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q11: If you had to choose between graphics layer (2D & 3D), or "real" browser support inside Emacs, which would you choose?
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q12: How'd you feel on being an Emacs focused Youtuber? Do you think Youtube generates a lot of new users?
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q13: There might once have been a debate whether to add more typesetting capablities to emacs to make it more of a word processor or work on the core performance issues. The current work on native compilation and the community's response to that work show users are actually very interested in perfomance enhancements. What is your opinion on it?
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q14: Can you give us a sneak peek of what's coming in the YouTube Channel soon?
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q15: what about guix ? videos about emacs and guix
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
- Q16: Are you interested in making Youtube videos on the new cool things happening in Emacs, like EAF or Nyxt?
- A: (Probably answered by voice.)
BBB:
- Hey Daviwil, I'm curious if you'll do a video showing your personal workflow?
- What do you think about Guix or Nixos + emacs videos ?
- It's nice to watch your videos and grab ideas from your workflows, or your code.
- That happens whenever I've used magit at work :D.
- Any thoughts on the idea that the best tool to use is the one which is easiest to leave? Possibly this is now even more relevant now that there is a heavy push to cloud services.
- I guess it also depends on who owns said tool (given that most cloud services aren't owned by the user).
- Do you think that there should an updated initial configuration for fresh Emacs installations with more "modern" (UI) features, or even CUA-like shortcuts?
- I really appreciate the live-video format: non-edited, live, thinking aloud videos - compared to all the polished super-edited "artificial" videos are more a show-of (see me!) as opposed to actually want to share knowledge...
- Hm. Will you do live pair-programming in the future? I believe you did that with JT some weeks ago.
- I would be very interested in summaries!
- Transcript remark: name mentioned by iLemming is written "John Lindquist".
- I think (possibly) emacs content might have been statistically relevant enough for bots to generate videos and upload them. For the last few months there seemed to be a constant stream of videos with the same intro and outro, plus some text to video in the middle.
- Sound like Tony's videos, which are user generated, but seem very automatic generated.
- 2 min videos will be *too* short - event for a short video. I think 5-10 min will allow for a good short intro to a specific functionality..
IRC:
- My anecdotal evidence, is introducing my coworkers to org mode, and the intracacies of doing more and more in Emacs. It becomes an overwhelming advantage.
- lots of really popular editors are primarily maintained by companies and dies when the backing companies stop maintaining it
- Popularity also adds to people breaking features that long time users like me use everyday but they don't see as popular and so they feel the need to break for something different.
- I think a lot of popularity could be gotten from introducing more people in academic fields to Emacs. Org-Mode is such a game changer on that front.
- Now, Emacs is based on another mind-blowing idea. The idea of practical notation for lambda calculus, what is known as Lisp. Lisp, probably can be crowned as the most important idea in computer science. It just hard to think of something more influential than Lisp. Emacs is just a practical implementation (and frankly, not the best one) of that idea.
- Yes. Emacs is an editor for creating domain specific editors.
- my only problem with the Emacs community is that the community in other language is non-existen
- Would there be any way to have other Lisps like Guile be compatible with Emacs?
- Guile has an Elisp interpreter in its compiler tower, however it's afaik not up to snuff for actually running Emacs.
- the problem is the "big datatypes" like buffers and strings, which guile either doesn't do at all or which need expensive bidirectional transcoding across the boundary
- some like this? https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/docs-1.8/guile-ref/Using-Guile-in-Emacs.html
- I think seeing power users do the things they do with Emacs and Org-mode and how prolific they are is a major selling point (thinking of *so* many people, but say John Kitchin comes to mind)
- To piggy back on a previous comment, I think if people kept seeing the top people in their fields (be in science/academic, software engineering, devops, etc.) use Emacs and Org-mode and especially their uniquely powerful features (literate style with org-babel, etc), Emacs would start taking over beyond it's historically low single digit % adoption
- luckily for me, John Kitchin shows a lot of engineering applications of emacs and org-mode and I love those videos, but I can understand that a lot of people won't find someone like that for their profession
- The concurrent pushes for reproducible science, literate programming, literate devops, and so on, also contribute to making the case for Emacs & Org-mode
- the performance point is spot on. That is one of the main reason why the neovim community is thriving
# Outline
- Discuss the core thesis, the features that make Emacs
desirable for long-term use (extensibility, day-to-day 'life' features)
- Include more background on the text editor landscape and
how the scope of various editors is more narrow and doesn't compare to Emacs.
- Talk about specific instances where editors were popular, fell out
of popularity, and why (due to changing fashions, not usually
better features).
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