Re: a look at the browser scene & emacs

[Richard Riley]

Xiao-Yong Jin <xj2106@columbia.edu> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> News about the browser world
>>> http://www.macworld.com/article/139022/2009/02/safari4firstlook.html?t=232
>>>
>>> emacs really needs to keep up.
>>>
>>> The IDE idea, from 1990s to 2000, basically reduced emacs market share
>>> from perhaps more than 50% in the early 1990s to maybe 1% today among
>>> professional programers.
>>>
>>> emacs today has lots of problems. Many of the “emacs way”, are
>>> technically inferior. But the nice elisp system holds it back still.
>>>
>>> The way for emacs to advance, is to get more people to use emacs.
>>> Emacs users today are already just the very small clique, half of
>>> which are perhaps over 40. With these small circle of people, every
>>> idea that's not “emacs way” gets stamped out.
>>
>> Or gets adapted to the Emacs way.  The result is that people get one
>> consistent tool.
>
> As a under 40 user, I very much like the idea of being
> consistent.  I don't like CUA mode and the new default
> transient mark mode behavior.  But I do like the idea of
> improving the display back-end of Emacs.  I love the
> upcoming version 23 because of the anti-aliased font support
> and much better handling of multibyte character encoding
> system.
>
> Nowadays, there are usually only three kinds of program on
> my desktop.
>
>     a. Emacs
>     b. urxvt
>     c. firefox
>
> All sorts of shell modes in Emacs are slow compared to
> urxvt.  And all web browsing modes are just lame.  I do most
> of my work in Emacs, but external term and browser is
> indispensable, as for now.  I would very much like to see
> the ideal society where people only fire up Emacs and do all
> sort of things in the good old Emacs way.  An efficient,

Yes, many people would. But the fact of the matter is more and more
"modern" users come to Emacs and shirk away because like it or not times
have changed since VTxxx. Let experts default it back to the stone age
and let new users see immediately that emacs does have transient marker
mode and CUA. (while on a CUA fan myself, I can not think of any time I
would want to NOT see the marked region as I create it).


> functional and versatile display back-end is what Emacs is
> really lack of.  This might be what Emacs can learn from
> webkit or XUL.
>
>
> Xiao-Yong

-- 
 important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the 
satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation 
of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.  ~Dennis Gabor, 
Innovations:  Scientific, Technological and Social, 1970