Emacs gives you back what you put into it. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using it at a very basic level, and getting to that point takes minimal time. There's a 15 minute interactive tutorial linked from the start screen at which point you're fully able to get work done. You can then reach for other goodies like Org, Magit, various interactive shells, tetris, whenever you want/need. I probably used Emacs for 5 years straight before installing a single package other than color themes.
To me the pitch for Emacs is it's the same overall platform now as it has been for decades and will probably continue to be. While all my colleagues were jumping from BBEdit to TextMate to Sublime to Atom and now VSCode, I've just been sitting here editing text.
The "15 minute tutorial" is emblematic of everything wrong with emacs and its community.
Just make CUA-compliant keybinds the default, and you'd draw in so many more users.
The ideal tool is one that you can start using right away, and incrementally dig into as you descend into madness/poweruserdom. The idea of having to waste 15 minutes before you can even start working in emacs is awful.
I used emacs for quite a few years only knowing how to save/open files and undo, because I refused to go through a tutorial that looks like it's stuck in 1970. I'm sure many others just give up and use vscode.
> The ideal tool is one that you can start using right away,
There's a strong correlation between things that are not so easy to get into but the gained efficiency later. Conversely, very often, something that is very intuitive off the bat starts feeling cluttered and not very efficient later.
Imagine if you go to a nuclear power plant control room (or the cabin of an industrial excavator) and tell them - "Jeez. So many knobs, buttons, and switches. Why can't someone design a single, incredibly intuitive interface with a huge touch-based display?" For them, those knobs, buttons, and switches are probably the most efficient way to operate their machinery, even though initially, it requires training, certification, etc.
You cannot prioritize both - for the novice and the professional at the same time. You either convince beginners to learn the tool or make a simplified version of the tool for beginners. But it will never be an ideal tool for a hardcore professional.
Yup. I personally bounce between Vim and many CUA-compliant Linux editors for editing text, and Zim-wiki for "what org-mode" can do:
I gave Emacs+Org-mode about a year or so, and I saw a whole lot to like, but lack CUA-compliance is literally the thing that stopped me, I just use too many other programs that aren't Emacs for this to work.
But look, you've been using Emacs for 10 years! That's ages in software time these days.
The downside to software that lasts a long time is that yes, vocabulary will change. So now you change to CUA compliant keybinds. Then the world changes again and now you're constantly chasing whatever is new and disrupting your users by throwing your whole "can use for 10+ years" value prop out the window.
To me the pitch for Emacs is it's the same overall platform now as it has been for decades and will probably continue to be. While all my colleagues were jumping from BBEdit to TextMate to Sublime to Atom and now VSCode, I've just been sitting here editing text.