The biggest problem Emacs has will not be solved by blog posts like this. For most people the editor is a means to an end. They are invested in their end goal, not in hunting down blog posts telling them how to make better use of their tools. If Emacs wants wider adoption is needs a better out-of-the-box experience, which is something that distros like Doom Emacs and Spacemacs offer. That's the only way to make a dent: when people boot it up it has to have the good stuff right in their face. This also means ditching the "vanilla Emacs only" snobbery.

That said, I'm the kind of person to invest time in my editor and I appreciate this post.

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.

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.

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.

Why does emacs have to be for everyone? Its attraction, to this user at least, is the lifelong process of adaptation and discovery that molds it to the user, and the user to it.

It’s like a pet. I love my dog, I’m happy to tell you about my dog, share pictures, etc. But in sharing, I’m not asking you to take _my_ dog. If you’re inspired to go find your own dog, train it, care for it, you can have a dog too!

But neither taking my dog nor the first-day experience of your own dog will replicate, and asking for a dog with a good OOTB experience IMO misses the point.

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.

FWIW Spacemacs has been breaking on update for me with depressing regularity the past couple years. I'm afraid to do it

aquaemacs was helpful for me when I was new to emacs backin ‘07. When I forgot some commands, having a gui with menus was handy.

rest of the world is ctrl-c, ctrl-x and ctrl-v. but emacs is in completely different world.

for emacs to gain mindshare, it needs to meet people where they are, not where emacs was 30 yrs ago.

of course, emacs does not work reliably in windows, so that is another issue