{"id":9442,"date":"2021-01-26T19:17:54","date_gmt":"2021-01-27T00:17:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9442"},"modified":"2021-01-26T19:27:28","modified_gmt":"2021-01-27T00:27:28","slug":"modernizing-emacs-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9442","title":{"rendered":"Modernizing Emacs (Again)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I cry out in despair, \u201cFor the love of Cthulhu, not again.\u201d And yet my pleas go unanswered. LWN<\/a> has an article on the latest iteration of \u201cHey kids! Let\u2019s make Emacs more modern<\/a>.\u201d that keeps reappearing on the Emacs-devel list like a stubborn rash that won\u2019t 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\u2014current users be damned.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got some objections. One of the complaints is that themes are too hard for n00bs to figure out. I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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<\/a>, which was all it took me to decide I didn\u2019t like it. None of this is very hard.<\/p>\n

This crystallizes my main objection to all this. To my mind, if you don\u2019t have the commitment to figure out how to install a theme of your liking\u2014again, a fairly trivial task\u2014then, 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\u2019re not willing to learn how to do that, what\u2019s the point?<\/p>\n

And really, I think chasing these \u201cnew users\u201d is mostly a fool\u2019s 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\u2019s equivalent of the web site developers of yore never will. They\u2019re all about pushing a button and having a bunch of boiler plate inserted for them. They\u2019ll never adopt Emacs.<\/p>\n

Every time I write something like that, I get accused of being mean but I don\u2019t mean to be. In this vein, another suggestion was to package some videos giving n00bs an overview. Here\u2019s what Stefan Monnier, a former lead Emacs maintainer, had to say about that<\/a>. See? I\u2019m not that mean.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I cry out in despair, \u201cFor the love of Cthulhu, not again.\u201d And yet my pleas go unanswered. LWN has an article on the latest iteration of \u201cHey kids! Let\u2019s make Emacs more modern.\u201d that keeps reappearing on the Emacs-devel … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-9442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9442"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9444,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9442\/revisions\/9444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}