Vivek Haldar has an interesting post in which he asks, essentially, what we need in an editor. He remarks that most people seem to want an editor that “looks good” and has certain performance and feature aspects that no one can agree on.
Haldar notes that other than having a readable font and decent syntax coloring, the “look” of an editor doesn’t matter. None of that will surprise the average Emacs user but he does make a point that we Emacs aficionados seem to understand subconsciously: like fine wine, a good editor is an old editor. That serves as a welcome riposte to the oft stated criticism that Emacs is old technology and that modern and presumably hip developers are using something with lots of dialog boxes and whatnot. Of course, the point is that Emacs has been around long enough to adapt to its users and their needs.
His Emacs user taxonomy is also interesting. I don’t agree with every classification but I do think he was it mostly right. What do you think? Do you recognize yourself in one of his categories?