Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 7, 2020 13:41 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
Parent article: Making Emacs popular again

I don't think tweaking GUI elements or changing terminology will make much difference. Emacs appeals to a certain mindset; I think there will always be enough users to keep it a viable project, but never enough to make it a mass-market contender.

I love Emacs and use it every day. I also use a lot of software that's much less popular than Emacs (such as my own Remind calendar tool.) Popularity, IMO, should be a secondary goal for software projects; once there's a critical mass of users and developers to keep the project viable, the main goal should be high quality.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 8, 2020 3:12 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

The concern about popularity for Emacs is that critical mass.

I am going to use Emacs until the bitter end, but it gets harder every year because there just aren't enough user/developers. I'm kind of on my own to figure out how to fix or add things in elisp.

Really popular open source tools just don't have quirks and missing pieces because there will always be someone capable of fixing them getting irritated enough to do it.

Making Emacs popular again

Posted May 8, 2020 20:10 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Yes, you do need a critical mass. I think emacs still has that critical mass.

Also, really popular open-source projects can have plenty of quirks and missing pieces, depending on the governance of the project. Both Gnome and KDE are extremely popular, and yet from my viewpoint, they are unusable because of quirks... the direction of those projects just doesn't suit the way I work. I guess the quirks are in the eye of the beholder in this case.