alt Hacker NewsEmacs isn't popular. It might've been in the 90s, but its star has faded now. It has niche appeal at best. Virtually everyone I interact with professionally views it as a dim memory best left in the past, or as something just inscrutably weird. Part of the reason why is "it's the UI, stupid". It needs a far better UX out of the box and by "better" I mean "more aligned with what literally every other program you are likely to use does for UX". (Just enabling cua-mode by default, and making the user toggle on "vanilla Emacs", would go far.) Most developers these days were brought up with Windows or Mac; they don't want to pretend to be using a PDP-11 or Lisp machine. One of the truths preached in the Gospel of Mac is that ALL programs need to be consistent with one another, and use the same visual look, menu hierarchy, and keybindings for corresponding commands.
> It needs a far better UX out of the box and by "better" I mean "more aligned with what literally every other program you are likely to use does for UX". (Just enabling cua-mode by default, and making the user toggle on "vanilla Emacs", would go far.)
> ...
> One of the truths preached in the Gospel of Mac is that ALL programs need to be consistent with one another, and use the same visual look, menu hierarchy, and keybindings for corresponding commands.
I started using Emacs on a Mac recently and was pleased to discover that it is, in fact, consistent with other programs.
- Cmd-C/X/V work as expected (copy/cut/paste from system clipboard)
- Cmd-Z undoes,
- Cmd-O brings up the open-file dialog, Cmd-T opens a new tab,
- Cmd-F invokes search and Cmd-L goes to line, and so on.
It uses the same global menu bar as other programs, and setting the font from the menu works. The only thing that didn't work is using Cmd-Shift-? to search through menu bar options. This is GNU's official MacOS build, not the custom-built emacs-mac or emacs-plus packages.
Last year I helped a non-programmer get started with Emacs (for the first time) on a Mac. After a couple of weeks their only remarks were that the customize interface looks a little dated and the config/custom file has a weird format. They never brought up the keybindings or other UI as an issue. Now I understand why -- Emacs is a reasonably good citizen on MacOS.