Subject: Re: bug#41403: A more user-friendly version of GNU Emacs

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 May 2020 07:43:13 -0700

Hi Andrew,

Andrew Goh via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text
editors" <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hello GNU Emacs team,

Thank you for your interest in Emacs.

> Can you find a more user-friendly way of using GNU Emacs without
> referring to a two page landscape GNU Emacs Reference Card? I

Do you have any concrete suggestions here?  We would of course like to
do things better, but we need concrete ideas to do that.

> understand that C-h is control-h, but what is M-x for example?

M-x runs the command `execute-extended-command'.  I'm not sure if that's
what you're asking.  It seems like I'm missing something.

> As for the ELisp language, well, now, concurrency is supported on many
> languages, could ELisp be updated to support concurrency fully with
> Lisp threads.

This is an ongoing discussion, and is anything but trivial to resolve.
I think we all agree it would be a good thing.  I would suggest you read
the recent discussion on emacs-devel about this.

One actionable thing today is to move forward with using lexical-binding
in more core libraries.  Anyone could help us with that by writing unit
tests for libraries in Emacs that are still using dynamic bindings.
That would give us confidence to move these libraries to
lexical-binding.  If you want to help, we would appreciate it.

> I was also wondering if you can add language extensions for Ruby and
> maybe Julia too.

Do you mean here that you want to extend Emacs using Ruby and Julia
instead of Emacs Lisp?  I think that's a no-go, for various reasons.
One important issue for me is that it would fragment the Emacs
eco-system, and force users to learn many languages to extend any part
of Emacs effectively.

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas