> Not being paid for a labour of love does not make one exempt from criticism.
I'm fine w/ criticism; I'm just of an opinion that the word "shit" is a bit too much; also I'm fascinated how the current emacs maintainer handles such a complex proj
> The software's user interface
which part? the majority of the user-visible 'interface' consists of so called interactive elisp cmds (runnable via M-x ...); the help for such cmds (or the whole modes) gets extracted from the corresponding fn comments & gets updated in real time when/if the code changes.
> and on-line documentation should be implemented in my language, but it's available only in English.
this is tough. the user's manual is huge. it'd probably take a year for a pro translator to produce a meaningful result
the elisp manual is even bigger
the tutorial is available in multiple lang, though
>> M-x speedbar That displays a hierarchical file browser in a separate window, not a list of documents.
click w/ the rigth btn in the speedbar win: a popup menu will appear. select speedbar->displays->buffers
> there's exactly 0 ppl in the world who get paid for writing emacs
I, too, am a free software author in my spare time and not paid for it. Not being paid for a labour of love does not make one exempt from criticism.
>> No localisation
> what do you mean?
The software's user interface and on-line documentation should be implemented in my language, but it's available only in English.
> M-x speedbar
That displays a hierarchical file browser in a separate window, not a list of documents.
>> Configuration is stored as code
> that's the whole point
Occasionally the sheer power is useful because a programming language gives you the power to do things that are not possible or very hard otherwise.
But for the vast majority of cases, most of the time, configuration should be stored in the moral equivalent of an INI file. That way I can process it externally. As it is now, I need to code a parser for elisp and replicate a decent chunk of the emacs runtime environment. That's just too difficult and time-consuming for anyone.
Very much related: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/langsec/occupy/
Turing-completeness should be the exception, not the norm, and only used when actually needed, not for trivial cases.
> long lines […] emacs suddenly becomes dog slow
Many editors have that same problem, so that one doesn't bother me much.