Just an anecdote about the older site. I was in a comp sci class at school a year ago. My classmate next to me asked what editor I use because it was a Beginning C++ class, and I said emacs. He went to the website which looked incredibly outdated to the expectations of new programmers, and just felt uncomfortable giving it a try. He opted for an editor with a more modern website.<p>So with the new website, which looks good, maybe emacs will seem more accessible and worth giving a try to new programmers who cross paths with it. At the same time, maybe that sense of accessibility is misleading given the learning curve of emacs that isn't exactly beginner-friendly. Nonetheless, I like the site!
As someone semi-new to using emacs, (I knew basic keybindings but never bothered to set up init files, etc.) coming from the IDE world, my biggest complaint was the amount of things I had to do to get vanilla emacs to behave in a civilized way, even using the GUI version. I spent hours scouring peoples emacs files on GitHub to try and find all the things that looked "obvious in retrospect" and settings that looked silly to have turned off by default (e.g. commands that act on regions should act on lines when no region is selected). Then my second biggest complaint was the analysis paralysis of all the plugins. I'm starting to get a stable emacs file, after a few months, but there's still several pieces of functionality I miss from my IDEs that I chunk out time every now and then to research and add. I think having a "if you're coming from IDEs you may want to install X Y Z" page would be helpful, as well as package download rankings so that people can find the popular projects (e.g. helm, use-package). It should also be prominently encouraged to use something like guru-mode where it disables the arrow keys to force you to use ctrl and meta as your movement keys.<p>Also you can pry Magit from my cold, dead hands.
The site seems to be having some trouble, so from the Wayback machine:<p>The previous site <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150522051725/http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20150522051725/http://www.gnu.or...</a><p>The new site on the 20th of April <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160420170002/http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20160420170002/http://www.gnu.or...</a>
Looks nice, but having a 1.1MB webpage with 7 different fonts seems somewhat wrong to me... We should start thinking about mobile clients who have to pay these MB.
It would be nice, if they will merge patches [1] for truecolor (16M colors) support in their console incarnation of emacs. Both Vim [2] and Neovim [3] already did this. Since most terminal emulators now support this mode [4], that will improve syntax highlighting and theme customizing to a new level.<p>[1] <a href="http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/RFC-Add-tty-True-Color-support-td299962.html" rel="nofollow">http://emacs.1067599.n5.nabble.com/RFC-Add-tty-True-Color-su...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/8a633e3427b47286869aa4b96f2bfc1fe65b25cd" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/8a633e3427b47286869aa4b96f...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/neovim/neovim/commit/8dd415e887923f99ab5daaeba9f0303e173dd1aa" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/neovim/neovim/commit/8dd415e887923f99ab5d...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728</a>
I switched back to emacs last month after 10 years in ides, vim and sublime and my hands still remember the key combinations. It's nice, like going back to an old favorite pair of shoes.
Also good to see the changes like the elpa/melpa stuff.
It looks real snazzy and nice. But I always liked that the GNU project did not try to look like the latest fad out of SV. Their low-fi HTML4 approach meant they could be browsed in anything and still be perfectly readable.
Another piece of "marketing" collateral that can help popularize Emacs is a "tour of Emacs" video. Awhile back, I watched Russ Cox's "Tour of Acme" video and became an Acme convert as a result.<p>In the end, an editor is a productivity tool, and the best way to evaluate it is seeing it in action as part of a workflow: video is an excellent format to capture and share this with newcomers.
Seems like GNU is going through a brand/design update. First Guile[1] then this!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/</a>
There is lots of IDE vs emacs discussion in this subject.
I have been using primarily (IntelliJ+IdeaVim) and sometimes (Emacs+evil) for the last few years.<p>If I want to write big, complex change in a codebase in Java/Scala/Python/Javascript I would use IntelliJ. Yet IntelliJ doesn't work well in many corner cases, like very big codebases, projects in C/C++ or languages not officially supported by Jetbrains, cross language projects (even with IJ Ultimate), remote editing or just quickly opening some github repo without spending time on any project setup. And extra emacs packages like magit and org-mode are irreplaceable.<p>Given the emacs flexibility I was able to configure Emacs to implement majority of IntelliJ keybindings. There usually is an equivalent emacs function of package for IntelliJ behavior, e.g. M-x and IntelliJ "Find Action". Emacs helm works a lot like fuzzy matching in IntelliJ. Sometimes I only implement the "similar" behaviour, e.g. "Show usages" vs "Grep for text at point in current project" in IJ. I will be writing a blog post about it at kozikow.wordpress.com, but if you are interested now now I can send you my .emacs.d.<p>In this setup I can just setup "fast, always works and easy to set up, but not too powerful" code navigation using ctags/ggtags, grep/ag and projectile in emacs and avoid packages like EDT, eclim-emacs or Jedi that are more powerful, but sometimes require custom per repository setup, or are slow. I usually have both emacs and IJ opened and switch between the two. I have a keybinding in both editors for "open current file in the other editor" (emacsclient + external tool in IJ).<p>So in the spirit of motto of Spacemacs - "The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim nor IntelliJ, it's Emacs and Vim and IntelliJ!"
A lot of text editors have a 1% of emacs power but a great web site and a great interface. This help them to shine in the IDE/Editors jungle. So, this new interface, will help emacs (from a "marketing" point of view).<p>Personally, I think that Emacs is one of the best editors. Not so simple to use (you may think if you are going to start without a tutorial), but, definely... very strong and personalizable.<p>I prefer to not compare with IDEs. The advantages of IDEs is that they have a particular UI and a set of tools focused for a particular language/development tool. This will allow you to have an initial set of features. Ready to use. Without spending your time to work on personalization. You may think to IDEs as editors with a restricted set of features (compared with emacs).
Does anyone know of a fun and engaging way to learn emacs, like VIM Adventures? I sit and stare at a list of emacs hotkeys any time I want to give it a shot and my eyes glaze over.
It's interesting that they used jquery (MIT licensed) for the web page, and also interesting given RMS's dislike of the use of Javascript. <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html</a>. MIT is GPL compatible, admittedly, so his main concerns about Javascript probably don't really apply here.
While the web site is nice, and the links to Emacs Rocks are great, perhaps it should also include a more comprehensive video introduction to Emacs, like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6jfrrwR10k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6jfrrwR10k</a>
"The best editor is not Emacs nor Vi, it's Vi + Emacs"<p>I've discovered [evil](<a href="https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil" rel="nofollow">https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil</a>) a few days ago and I'm in love.
Omg now can someone please fix the apex domain?<p>I don't want to live in a world where I can't like formal verification and modern website design
Very slow to load on a mobile device, looking at the page size it seems quite heavy, especially for a site aimed at promoting or representing a text editor (and a lot more I know, I know).