Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 1:03 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
Parent article: Making Emacs popular again

> there is also the philosophical question of what it is, exactly, that stops the venerable text editor from being more popular

> Richard Stallman, one of the original authors of Emacs, seemed somewhat dismissive

One wonders just what could possibly be holding the editor back.

I used to follow the Emacs development list, back when I used Emacs as my primary editor. (I still use Emacs for TeX, using AuCTeX, but for everything else I now use vim. One of these days I need to learn vim-latexsuite.)

Any attempt to do anything outside the norm, especially improvements focused on new users, usability, or more integration of powerful features, was met with derision, contempt, and elitism that has no place in any modern project, most of it from the same few people.

(To clarify something: I'm not talking about changes that would break things for experienced Emacs users. I'm talking about changes that would leave experienced Emacs users unaffected, and improve usability for new users.)

That's leaving aside the copyright assignment problem; I've seen perfectly reasonable GPL-licensed code, code that many developers wanted to include, rejected out of hand because the FSF didn't own the copyright. I've even seen demands to refuse to *mention* such code, lest people be able to find it. (One excellent example: Magit, a popular interface to git.)

Emacs is an incredible tool, and its extensibility and programmability are incredible. In my opinion, the biggest thing holding it back is a small handful of unwelcoming elitist developers in its community, and the second biggest thing is the FSF's copyright assignment policy.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 1:52 UTC (Thu) by mohg (guest, #114025) [Link] (2 responses)

> I've seen perfectly reasonable GPL-licensed code, code that many developers wanted to include, rejected out of hand because the FSF didn't own the copyright.

I don't think the copyright assignment issue is something that needs to be reported anecdotally. It is the stated policy for GNU Emacs. There is some rationale for it at

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html

which of course not everyone agrees with. Many GNU projects don't have this requirement. I suspect many Emacs developers would be happy without this policy, but don't feel strongly enough to make a serious challenge to the status quo (or fork).

> I've even seen demands to refuse to *mention* such code

I've only ever seen Richard Stallman say this. I find it a strange position for him to take, and have never seen anyone agree with it.

I'm not sure these are the issues "holding Emacs back" (if anything is). XEmacs had no copyright assignment requirement, and it died.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 2:36 UTC (Thu) by cmonsanto (subscriber, #96651) [Link]

> I'm not sure these are the issues "holding Emacs back" (if anything is).

The copyright assignment policy contributes to the pointless ELPA vs MELPA schism. For those unfamiliar with Emacs, MELPA is where the majority of Emacs packages live. It should be usable by default.

You couldn't pay companies to incorporate Emacs' source in their non-free products. Nobody cares. This is a complete own goal.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 8, 2020 3:11 UTC (Fri) by val314159 (guest, #138703) [Link]

Wasn't XEmacs branched b/c RMS thought X was stupid (in so many words)?
And once the firefights were over, RMS actually merged the changes back b/c so many users wanted them.
In fact, GNU emacs was a branch as well.

Seems history is on the side of the users if someone supports them.

as a case in point in modernity, ELisp used dynamic bindings until very recently and I have never seen another lisp system that does that since the 1980s.

another side note, explaining why "frames" are "windows" and "buffers" and "files" makes EVERYONE'S eyes glaze over.