I recently put a rant on Twitter about how Emacs could be improved in the hand of Apple, not FSF. There was a response from a guy I don't know saying Apple would ruin Emacs with their "mousey" tendency. No this has nothing to do with mouse.
Emacs is a good software and like it a lot. I even have a lot of customization in .emacs and .emacs.d. Many of them are nice, but I think half of them shouldn't be there in the first place (e.g. heavy keybindings and usability customization, frequently used extensions). In this regard I think Emacs suffer from the same problem most Unix distributions face - highly customizable but barely usable (without customization). Users must spend time on and on customizing the thing just to use it. This explains why they failed, are failing and will continue to fail at the desktop market. Apple did a really good job here with Mac OS X.
Some people would argue that customization is fun. Yeah it is, and actually many geeks like it, just like some people like masturbation. It's not bad, but rather pointless (Stuart Halloway made this analogy with Java's bloated frameworks in this video about concurrent programming in Clojure).
I know giving Emacs to Apple might not be a good idea due to all this technology "politics". The point here is that FSF has something to learn from Apple about making usable stuffs.
No comments:
Post a Comment