Making Emacs Popular Again
New employee 1 workflow at company X:<p>1. Install VS Code<p>2. Click extensions and install language specific plugin<p>3. Work<p>New employee 2 workflow at company X:<p>1. Install emacs<p>2. Try to install some source code indexing tool<p>3. Tool is missing 13 dependencies, so spend 4 hours finding, installing and configuring the dependencies.<p>4. Spend another couple hours reading non-existent to terrible documentation (documentation so bad in places that even Stallman finds it useless) across 3 packages and editing .emacs to configure an otherwise unusable result. It looks like source code indexing is working! It isn’t...<p>5. Go home<p>6. The next morning, find the default color theme garish and spend another 4 hours installing themes and theme managers, reading more terrible documentation, and finding that obscure TTY settings must be tweaked for emacs to decide that it can use a theme (even though it has no problem displaying the colors in the first place)<p>7. Spend the rest of your tenure constantly hitting code indexing and highlighting bugs that need constant tweaking and workarounds. You often find yourself using find&#x2F;grep because it’s often faster than debugging the latest indexing bug.<p>8. Discover that the vaunted ‘lightening fast editing’ with ‘multiple cursors!’ and this mode or that mode don’t matter because the slowest part of the creative process is the creativity and not your typing.<p>Emacs is a terrible experience  with defaults suitable for a 70s TTY. That you can change it misses the point. The fact that everyone has to have a non-empty, non trivial .emacs file means it is maximally unsuitable - for everyone.<p>In a few years, VS Code has achieved better out of the box functionality for working professionals than emacs has in 40 years.