Toward a “modern” Emacs
Emacs is in that disastrous stage of a product&#x27;s life where the geezers destroy their own community by refusing to adapt to new expected behavior, thus driving away the newbies.  Eventually the product dwindles to just supporting the few remaining geezers left.<p>I&#x27;m not talking about stupid fads such as skinning and color palette changes.  But cut-copy-paste keybindings (not to mention select-all, save, close window, undo, etc.) are not a fad.  They have been the standard in everything <i>except</i> for Emacs for over THIRTY FIVE YEARS.  They were standard when Ronald Reagan was president.<p>Pop-up menus on right-button-click have been standard for almost as long, dating to X11 and NeXTSTEP (which is where OS X got them).<p>And the most awful trend is in preventing clear improvements in modes and functionality from coming to the forefront simply because geezers are not used to them.  The argument seems to be that making all these kinds of things standard would be hard on the geezers. This is nonsense.  Unlike the newbies, the geezers <i>know how to turn this stuff off</i>.<p>The geezers prevent this because Emacs is their ecosystem.  But for everyone else, Emacs is a small part of a much larger ecosystem (MacOS, Linux, Windows) with which it is increasingly incompatible and archaic.  This is myopia pure and simple.