path: root/2022/captions/emacsconf-2022-rms--what-id-like-to-see-in-emacs--main.vtt

WEBVTT captioned by anush

NOTE GNU Emacs and its purpose

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Hello! I'm going to talk about what I would like to see

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in GNU Emacs in the future,

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and what I would prefer not to find there.

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This is all within the context

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of GNU Emacs and its purpose.

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GNU Emacs is a part of the GNU operating system,

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and the purpose of the GNU operating system

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is not simply to do a good job technically,

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not simply to be good to use.

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Its main purpose, its overall purpose,

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is to give people freedom,

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and to help them value and defend that freedom.

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A GNU package, by being a convenient, well-written program,

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should contribute to that overall ethical and social goal,

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and not only to the usefulness of our software.

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This is true for GNU Emacs

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as much as it is for any other free program we’ve developed.

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In fact, GNU Emacs is the first GNU program that I released.

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I had written some other things before that,

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but didn't release them at that time.

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There was no particular use in doing so.

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So it was through GNU Emacs

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that I learned about various things

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such as software licenses and how to defend freedom.

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You're of course familiar with what GNU Emacs is today,

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thanks to the contributions of thousands of other people

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who came after me.

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What would I like?

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What would other people like?

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Lots of people come to Emacs familiar with VS Code,

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and they say, "Please make Emacs more like VS Code.

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Change everything that you did in the 1980s and 90s

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to be like that other thing."

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That wouldn't be feasible even if we wanted to.

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Our goal is not to be... not resembling VS Code.

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Any resemblance is coincidental.

NOTE Lisp as the extension language

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But in particular,

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we do not want to have extension languages other than Lisp.

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Emacs Lisp is the variant of Lisp

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that we've always supported,

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which has evolved along with Emacs.

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We can conceivably have Scheme as well,

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if we can sufficiently solve the problems,

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the technical problems of making Scheme

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and Emacs Lisp interoperate.

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We did some design work, I think that was with Tom Lord,

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whom the community will greatly miss.

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In the 1990s, there are challenges that remain;

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maybe it can be done.

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But a non-Lispy language would be a mistake.

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It would divert our development focus into areas

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that we don't need, languages that are less powerful,

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less beautiful, and less desirable for the purpose.

NOTE JavaScript versus freedom

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However, the language that we above all shouldn't support

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is JavaScript. That's not because of the language itself.

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I don't know the JavaScript language,

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I've heard people say it's rather clumsy

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and not well designed, but I don't know this.

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In any case, it's not what my views are based on.

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There's something much worse about JavaScript,

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which is not the language itself, but how people use it.

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Namely, it's been adopted as a way for a network server

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to send a program to your machine

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without your even noticing, so that this program,

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written by you don't know who, will run on your computer

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and do you don't know what.

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And you're supposed to just trust

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all and sundry developers of software

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for the sites you visit,

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which very commonly do malicious things, often unknown

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to the people who are running the server itself.

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They paid someone else to design a website

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and they probably said, oh,

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make it fashionable and attractive.

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And they didn't insist, don't snoop on the visitors,

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even if they understood what the issue was.

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So these sites snoop. It's a serious problem.

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The problem comes not from the language JavaScript,

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but from the fact that browsers, by default,

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will pull in JavaScript code that gets sent to them

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and run it to do anything at all.

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Emacs is supposed to defend your freedom.

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It's supposed to help you to defend your freedom,

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and lead you to defend your freedom,

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which means it shouldn't lead you

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to throw your freedom away as soon as you visit a site

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that tries to send you a non-free program

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to run straight off of that other machine.

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So it's important not to lead users

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to do computing this way.

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So what are some good things

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that we would want instead of this?

NOTE Updating "An Introduction to Emacs Lisp Programming"

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One thing we want

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is to update the "Introduction to Emacs Lisp Programming"

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by the late Bob Chassell.

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It's a book that makes it easy for even non-programmers

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to learn to write simple programs in Emacs Lisp.

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And from there, they can go on to do better.

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We made a pretty big change in Emacs Lisp

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a few years ago, implementing lexical scoping by default.

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Originally, Emacs Lisp used to be entirely dynamic scoping,

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like some of the earliest Lisp interpreters.

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This is a change that should have a careful job

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of updating for the introduction.

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I'm sure we've made it clear in the reference manual,

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but that's not what beginners read first.

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We need something to teach them in lexical scoping.

NOTE More memorable package names

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Another thing we could use is to make it easier

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to understand the facilities that we have.

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For instance, I think every package

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that you might load into your Emacs and run

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should have a name that helps you remember what job it does.

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It doesn't have to be super long to tell you

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what job that package does.

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You can read the description to learn that.

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But once you've read the description,

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it should be memorable. When you see that name again,

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you should realize, oh, that's the package I could use

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to do "less" and so. We've had a tendency

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to give packages names for the sake of pure wordplay

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or lack of obvious meaning,

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and I think we should add on, to those packages,

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names that people will remember.

NOTE Simplifying the command interface

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Also, there are ways we can simplify the command interface

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of Emacs. For instance, there are many different parameters

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users can specify that can have several values,

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and sometimes you do various kinds of editing

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in one session. That's normal in Emacs,

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and you might want different parameter settings

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for different kinds of editing.

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So you specify parameter value A, do some editing,

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you specify parameter value B, and do some editing,

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and you'd switch back and forth, so you want

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to switch back and forth between these parameters.

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I think we should aim ...

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People have added various commands to switch

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between the last two or n values of this parameter,

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and another command to switch

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between the last two or n values of this [other] parameter,

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and then that parameter, you know, and that parameter.

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I think we should be able to have

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a switch between the last n values command

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that works on various different parameters,

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and thus makes it easy to remember

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that there is this facility.

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Because right now the commands to do that are all ad-hoc,

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and if you don't use a toggling among the last n values

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of a given parameter, you won't know how to do it.

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It won't be obvious that there is a way,

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so you'd have to go to a suitable manual

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and study for a while to think of that.

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We could make this easily discoverable.

NOTE Modularity

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There is another kind of modularity that's important,

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and that is modularity at the level of maintenance.

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This is something all programmers know about, of course,

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but in Emacs, various parts interact with other parts,

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and we've tried to make them modular in design

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by using lots of hooks,

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but we haven't gone as far as we could.

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With some effort, we could find calls

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from over here to over there

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that could be replaced by use of hooks,

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so that we could reduce the extent

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to which you need to know about one part of Emacs

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to maintain another part of Emacs,

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and I think that as we keep adding more facilities to Emacs,

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this kind of modularity will be an investment that pays off.

NOTE Editing formatted text

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There’s one big area of features

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that I would like to see in Emacs,

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and that's the ability to edit

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formatted documents in WYSIWYG, to be able to edit

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a letter or a scientific mathematical paper with formulas

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or a nicely laid out manual,

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looking at what it's really going to look like.

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Now we have free software to do this.

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For instance, I use LibreOffice some of the time.

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Sometimes it's faster than writing something

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to be formatted with a text formatter

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and then formatting it. But when I use LibreOffice,

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I always miss the commands and facilities,

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the editing facilities of Emacs.

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I'd like to have them both together, something with

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the text formatting capabilities of LibreOffice

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or even better of TeX, but the editing commands

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and facilities of Emacs. This would be a big job,

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but it can be made up of a lot of medium-sized jobs.

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If people start working on those medium-sized jobs,

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then in a number of years

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we'll have something absolutely amazing.

NOTE Not the equivalent of a modern web browser

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But one thing I think we really shouldn't have

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is the equivalent of a modern web browser.

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The World Wide Web started out in the 1990s

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in a much simpler form,

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where a web page described its contents,

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and the web browser laid them out,

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and the user could parameterize

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how to lay out various kinds of situations.

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This was not only convenient for users

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who wanted to control things and understand things,

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it was also freedom-respecting

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because the layout was done by your browser.

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If you had a free browser, you were in control,

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even though the browser was complicated already.

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But starting around two decades ago,

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there was an explosion in the complexity of browsers

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as companies wanted to have more and more control

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over exactly what would appear on a user's screen.

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So they invented lots of features to control that,

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features where the user couldn't really customize

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how something would actually appear

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because the whole point was that

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the company could control that.

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And JavaScript was sort of the ultimate level

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of "the company controls everything."

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Because of this, going beyond the simple level

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of web page formatting features in Emacs

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is basically heading down a path that leads to subjugation.

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It's a path that we need to stay away from.

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It's a path to an unjust world of computing

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that you can easily see around you.

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Web browsers nowadays are designed to display ads

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that you may not want to see.

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They're designed for DRM.

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They're designed for companies to snoop on you

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in unobvious ways. And all of that

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we should protect ourselves from,

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protect our users from.

NOTE Getting involved

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So I hope that some of you will be enthusiastic

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about some of these changes,

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especially towards editing formatted text.

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If you want to get involved, we have

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a development discussion list called emacs-devel@gnu.org.

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You can join that. You can also,

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if you get interested in working on a package

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and you're not an experienced Emacs Lisp developer,

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it's a very good idea to look for an experienced developer

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to talk with.

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Make sure you can write programs in Emacs Lisp first.

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It's not useful to take up the expert’s time learning that.

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You can still learn it from the introduction.

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But after that, when it's a matter of how to design

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your favorite package, do have a discussion with developers.

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They'll give you design ideas

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that will help you make a package that we put into Emacs.

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Now it's time for questions.