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0 pointsnvy2y ago0 comments

The emacs out-of-box experience is notoriously poor, as evidenced by the rise and popularity of emacs starter packs, some of which have been on the hn front page of late.

I've been using emacs since 2002 or so and until very recently it needed a ton of third party config to approximate the ux and utility of what was available in other tools built in.

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globular-toast2y ago· 3 in thread

So just use a starter kit. Why do people put so much importance on "out of the box experience"? Who actually cares? Out of the box only matters if you can't change what you get from the box. But you can. That's the entire point of emacs.

Emacs is the way it is because it's almost 40 year old software that still tries not to break users' configs. Do VS Code users even have configs? Most of them seem to just lap up whatever is dished out to them.

nvyOP2y ago

Because the "out of box experience" turns lots of users away, including future potential contributors. Emacs could be so much better if it had a larger pool of users from which to draw developers. Read the mailing lists- it's plain to see that Eli and a few others are seriously burnt out. The project is not healthy, despite outward appearances.

There's a sizeable group of emacs users who are "it works for me" grognards and for whom any change to make emacs better constitutes an assault on them as a person.

If that's you, just down vote and move on and continue enjoying living in your ensconced world of mediocre software. I don't have energy to have this argument yet again.

globular-toast2y ago

It would certainly be good to ensure the future of emacs. I'm not sure the set of people who care about out of the box and the set of people who would be future maintainers is a very large intersection, but it's probably nonzero. Personally over the years I've come to think emacs just isn't for everyone. Not everyone wants to be free. The Matrix told us that. I've come to accept I'll always be part of a small group of weirdos who like this stuff and that's fine. But if there's a genuine move towards ensuring the future of emacs by changing defaults then I'm all for it.

Are there any recent practical discussions about this? What's the barrier to someone simply taking something like emacs bedrock and making a snap out of it? I just checked and VS Code simply offers a .deb or .rpm for Linux. Wouldn't including an init.el make everyone happy? Or is there more to it?

Also, what is a good out of the box experience for emacs? I don't think it's code completion or whatever VS Code does. I think it's being easy to hack. That's what makes emacs great. It's not about what it does, it's about what you can do with it.

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eviks2y ago

> Who actually cares?

everyone who doesn't want to waste many hours tweaking the basics that have been already fixed by countless people before

> Emacs is the way it is because it's almost 40 year old software that still tries not to break users' configs

More likely it's the way it is because of attitudes like in the previous point discounting the obvious flaw of this mighty app

juxtapose2y ago

AFAIU this is a discoverability problem, not that emacs isn't featureful ootb. Some of emacs's built-in features (e.g. undo in region) are even not supported at all by other editors.

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