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I understand your point of view, but as far as the Emacs community is concerned there is no problem.

Emacs is not an editor. Emacs is not an IDE. Emacs is a platform to develop your own tooling. Text is the main interface Emacs offers.

I don't speak for the Emacs community, there isn't even such a thing except maybe semi related groups that share viewpoints, usage and interests. But on the whole, I don't think the "Emacs community" is looking for users or is looking to attract users. At least not users who are looking for "text editor experiences" that mimic or take inspiration from VS Code and the likes.

by noufalibrahim1 hours ago|

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I generally agree. I look at Emacs like a lisp interpreter with text editing primitives on which someone has built a decent editor.

There was a "community" about a decade or two ago. On Freenode IRC, there were regulars who hung around in #emacs and it was quite nice. There were no corporate sponsors or random startups trying to hire from there so it was genuinely just a bunch of people who enjoyed using Emacs and were chatting about it. It's a part of the reason I got really hooked into it. I still use Org heavily for meeting minutes etc.

by michaelanckaert43 minutes ago|

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There is still a "community" on platforms such as Mastodon, reddit, various repo's. But I don't think there is a single community that can be pointed to as "The Emacs community". This would also be "wrong" from a Libre Software point of view.

by lycopodiopsida3 hours ago|

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There is no "problem" in emacs (there are big technical problems, but not this one) and no need to get "most people" on emacs - the ecosystem is healthy by all means and only increasing.

The "out of the box" experience could be better - but for emacs users. Those, who expect VS Code, should just install it and live happy.

by zelphirkalt2 hours ago|

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I think whoever really wants to know what Emacs is about will give it a try and spend some time with it. Or some other distro like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs or stuff like that, if they are after a better out of the box experience.

What truly is a problem and extremely difficult to solve, is getting multi core and concurrency into Emacs properly. A truly concurrent lightweight thing would be so amazing to have and make package development probably much easier. No more worrying about accidentally blocking the UI and all that.

To get there would probably break many existing packages and would probably occupy all maintainers for 3 years or so, because Emacs comes from a time, where software was not designed to support that.

by kqr3 hours ago|

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That would be a problem if the Emacs project needed to attract new users that aren't "the kind of person to invest time in" their editor.

I'm not sure it does. Emacs has a healthy user base of people like you and I and appears to receive stable funding from the FSF. I don't see that changing any time soon. Emacs can be Emacs and be just fine the way it is.

I will keep suggesting new users should aim to get as close to vanilla as they have patience for, because that will teach them more about the powerful virtual machine running their text editor, and the ways it can be bent to do their bidding.