Making Emacs Modern

Bozhidar Batsov has a post on one of my favorite hobbyhorses: making Emacs more modern. I’ve written about this several times. See here and here for example. Batsov is not sympathetic either. As Batsov notes, almost all these proposed modernizations are trivial things like “start in dark mode” or “show line numbers by default”. Others may require loading a package—such as lsp-mode or company-mode but are also easily available right now. Still others are essentially impossible (even if they were desirable) such as rewriting Emacs in some other language, which would disable the huge collection of third party packages. Finally, we have proposals to cripple Emacs by making it mouse-centric.

The thing is, most of the people making these suggestions are not Emacs users and almost certainly never will be. They’re always going to prefer an editor with glitz and bling so even if Emacs made all the changes they’re demanding, they’d still go elsewhere.

Emacs has seen tremendous progress lately with such things are native compilation and a host of lesser improvements and none of it would have been possible if the developers had spent their time making silly cosmetic changes. Batsov notes that there are plenty of “modern” editors that are less popular than Emacs so (visual) modernity is no guarantee of popularity.

Being an Emacs user is great. One of the few downsides is having to listen to the constant dirge demanding that it be modernized.

This entry was posted in General and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.