Re: Gitlab Migration

[Stefan Kangas]

Elias Mårtenson <lokedhs@gmail.com> writes:

> If whatever is popular equals better, then Emacs would have been rewritten in 
> Java already, no wait, Ruby, no actually Python, sorry I meant Javascript.
>
> A lot of things are familiar to a lot of people, but familiarity is 
> orthogonal to quality.

Many of the things some of us would like to see changed are not mainly
characterized by being particularly good. They are just different.

To give a concrete example, the kill ring is objectively better/more
powerful than the undo/redo you find in other text editors. It is also
harder to use, of course, but that's the territory Emacs thrives in.

But why is kill-region bound to C-w instead of C-x? I'm not really
advocating to change that key binding, but it is also clearly not
better. In fact, it is worse, precisely because one might as well use
the more familiar key binding. If we started Emacs from a clean slate
today, we would obviously have put kill-region on C-x.

We would in my opinion do well to take opportunities to make Emacs
behave more in line with modern user expectations. As the above
example shows, that is not always going to be easy. But there is no
reason to expect that careful work here would not lead to a better, if
slightly different, Emacs. (And if you hate the results, Emacs is
always going to be customizable. So you can have your cake, and eat it
too.)