I cry out in despair, “For the love of Cthulhu, not again.” And yet my pleas go unanswered. LWN has an article on the latest iteration of “Hey kids! Let’s make Emacs more modern.” that keeps reappearing on the Emacs-devel list like a stubborn rash that won’t go away. The suggestions are mostly the usual silliness like making the default theme be dark mode, and, of course, making CUA mode the default—current users be damned.
I’ve got some objections. One of the complaints is that themes are too hard for n00bs to figure out. I’m not sure what happens these days but when I first started using Emacs I recall being asked if I wanted what we now call a light or dark theme. I chose the light theme and all the other syntax highlighting colors were chosen for me and seemed perfectly fine. Later, when I had a bit more experience and the white background began bothering my eyes, I set background to a light tan and made the cursor red. That’s one line for the background and one for the cursor. Installing the theme of your choice is even easier. If, at that point, I had wanted a more specialized theme, I would have had no problem installing it. Indeed, I did install Solarized for about 38 seconds, which was all it took me to decide I didn’t like it. None of this is very hard.
This crystallizes my main objection to all this. To my mind, if you don’t have the commitment to figure out how to install a theme of your liking—again, a fairly trivial task—then, really, Emacs is probably not for you. Emacs is all about providing you with a highly customized text processing environment. You start with something very basic and mold it to fit your needs. If you’re not willing to learn how to do that, what’s the point?
And really, I think chasing these “new users” is mostly a fool’s errand. The new users who are serious developers will find Emacs or Vim or another editor that meets their needs on their own. The new users who are today’s equivalent of the web site developers of yore never will. They’re all about pushing a button and having a bunch of boiler plate inserted for them. They’ll never adopt Emacs.
Every time I write something like that, I get accused of being mean but I don’t mean to be. In this vein, another suggestion was to package some videos giving n00bs an overview. Here’s what Stefan Monnier, a former lead Emacs maintainer, had to say about that. See? I’m not that mean.