Re: Changes for emacs 28

[Göktuğ Kayaalp]

On 2020-09-13 19:17 +03, Ergus <spacibba@aol.com> wrote:
> Agree. But many times they need to reinvent the wheel and duplicate
> efforts to add things unavailable and claimed in vanilla (there are many
> examples of unneeded duplication in melpa with almost no differences
> between them.)

That’s not a net negative.  Similar packages cater to similar but
different needs.

By that logic why have different text editors one ed(1) can handle all
text editing?

If you don’t think about it in competitive and/or corporate terms,
coexistence of similar but different projects is a net positive for any
use case because people’s needs are similar but different.

> Sometimes maybe, but in general... Why emacs may not?

B a c k w a r d s   c o m p a t i b i l i t y .

> Sorry, I should have added: compared to emacs ;p

Doesn’t change much.  Many of the editors we’re talking about are as
good and as capable as Emacs.

> The difference is that vanilla is not a kernel not a "distro" but both.
>
> The number of kernel developers is relatively big and the number of
> GNU/Linux distros is huge, so they come and go without affecting the
> kernel at all. There are also some companies implied to support the
> kernel in different ways and of course the sort of "monopoly" the kernel
> has in some fields like HPC and IOT.
>
> While in our case emacs vanilla IS the distro, with many alternatives
> around and a small set of developers doing their best.
>
> So in case of a comparison, maybe openBSD is a more realistic
> parallelism... and to compare with a distro you should look at spacemacs
> or equivalents. If a distro disappears there are others coming, but if
> the kernel disappears (or die) then also the distros will.

I don’t get what this is supposed to mean.  Emacs has lived on with way
smaller popularity and a smaller number of core developers for decades.

And the main roadblock there is the C core, not anything else.  There
are efforts like Remacs and Guile-Emacs, which are relevant in that
space.

> I agree there, but not every piece of code is emacs. Otherwise we won't
> have a music player, eww, mail client, terminal and gui interface,
> dired and so on.
>
> We can't expect to do the same than a specialized program (unless we
> try). But text editing es something that almost everyone does so almost
> everyone needs a text editor.

You’d be surprised.  The majority of computer users mainly use phones
and the majority of users don’t even know what plain text is, let alone
editing is.  You’d be surprised how hard it is to explain the concept of
plain text to people.

We’re a niche within a niche within a niche.

--
İ. Göktuğ Kayaalp / @cadadr / <https://www.gkayaalp.com/>
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