Red Meat Friday: Modernizing Emacs

I originally planned this as a short rant on the idea that Emacs needs to be modernized. The discussion has been raging for a while on the Emacs-devel list but was pretty much inside baseball until an lwn.net article on the discussion. Now everyone seems to be talking about it.

That’s good for me because I thought my objection to the whole thing was just another example of my innate and ever-increasing grumpiness. Hence my framing it as a Red Meat Friday post. It turns out I needed have worried. Vivek Haldar, who knows a bit about editors, reacted with a pithy tweet:

Others, such as systemhalted, had a bit more to say and suggested that Emacs is already a modern editor. Vfclists says that Emacs developers are not the type of people who will spend their time trying to make Emacs look more modern. Derek Taylor devoted an entire video to the debate. His take is that the whole thing is silly. He equates the effort to modernize Emacs with a desire to dumb it down. The problem is that the n00bs whom the whole thing is intended to attract still won’t adopt Emacs and the current users will move on.

My personal take is neatly summed up by Dragan Djuric:

A lot of the “modernization” suggestions are the usual silliness:

  • Have Emacs start with a dark theme.
  • Make CUA the default so, God forbid, n00bs will not have to enable it themselves.
  • Make installing a theme (even) easier.
  • Make the start screen more “welcoming.”

These are what engineers of my generation call “eyewash:” Something of no utility meant to impress the outsiders.

To be fair, some of the ideas are not so trivial but, really, I wish these people would let the developers—who are volunteers doing this for free on their own time, remember—spend their time on substantive changes as they always have. If you’re convinced that Emacs needs some sort of out-of-the-box starter configuration for n00bs, feel free to implement it. It’s not that hard. Just don’t ask our already overextended developers to do it for you.

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