I will check it out in 10 years if it's still around. In the mean time I have actual work I need to get done.

> In the mean time I have actual work I need to get done.

That's probably how most VS Code users feel about learning Emacs after reading about it on HN :)

I doubt they have had 20 years of using to it though.

This kind of ties back in to the point of the article.

For people who have used $EDITOR for 20+ years there's little incentive to change to something else, but if you want to bring in fresh eyes to your project so that there'll be enough people around in another 20 years to maintain the whole thing it behoves you to think about attracting those people.

Sane defaults and being more approachable is a good way to do that.

Does emacs even offer anything like `vimtutor`?

>Does emacs even offer anything like `vimtutor`?

https://i.stack.imgur.com/egD8V.jpg

That is the splash page that hasn't changed much since 2000. Reading the helpfully highlighted first menu entry do you think that Emacs has a tutorial?

Users who can't even be bothered to read the text in front of them are not an asset to a project that doesn't charge them, they are a liability since they force the project in stupid directions. The death of firefox is a perfect example.

The thing that Emacs should focus on the future is true concurrency. Nice to haves would be a non-gtk gui, adding scheme scripting support and releasing a space cadet mechanical keyboard.

I don't follow this stuff closely, but I do have it in my RSS reader.

Here's someone recreating the Space Cadet keyboard key caps -- i.e. the plastic covers for the keys, not the actual keyboard. This is a more modern profile (key shape), rectangular/cylindrical similar to modern keyboards rather than the spherical top of the key like in the 1970s and 1980s.

It might give you an idea how expensive a custom keyboard would be.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MechGroupBuys/comments/j3pmmn/gb_gm...

> releasing a space cadet mechanical keyboard

The mechanical keyboard community will probably get there first.

From a quick search, I've found this [1], which goes a bit beyond the original Space Cadet keyboard.

[1] https://yiancar-designs.com/portfolio/hyper7/

> Does emacs even offer anything like `vimtutor`?

Yup. And iirc it's more discoverable than vimtutor because it's on the first page of the vanilla Emacs

Certainly, but that's where the not-so-steep learning curve helps.

I've been using Emacs for an entire 1 year and I have to say - I only like OrgMode. I've barely tried out Magit, so maybe that's another killer feature. But for programming, I think that Emacs is too steep a hill to climb when VSCode and JetBrains' IDEs offer so much out of the box or just a few clicks/commands away. In Emacs, you can can, in theory, do anything you like. And it is so impressive when you customize it to behave in a certain way. It's also more open for tweaking than any other editor. 'describe-function' and 'describe-key' are super cool, for example. But VSCode is just more practical. Instead of writing some Elisp (which is an incredibly awkward language) to customize your IDE, you can just go to the extensions screen and very likely find and download an extension that does what you want. Maybe not exactly. Maybe you could make Emacs behave much more precisely, according to your preferences. But you might spend hours, if not days, depending on your level of expertise. Meanwhile, with VSCode, you essentially bypass all that.

You are totally right. Being an emacs user for 10 years, I suggest vscode when people ask what editor to choose.

While preconfigured Spacemacs, Doom and others are doing a good job in turning emacs into OOB editor, they still require some tinkering with lisp, while in vscode you just install plugins and you are done.

Have you tried preconfigured Emacs distributions, like Doom or Spacemacs? You just open your init.el file and uncomment packages you want to enable with pretty good defaults. They have package managers preinstalled too, like straight.el. Also, every package has easy to paste initialization snippet

Found Spacemacs to be slow and buggy, Doom's fine so far though