Emacs might never catch up to Visual Studio Code, which is actively funded by Microsoft, but intuitively, it seems like Emacs ought to be able to catch up to Vim. It's always been weird writing Emacs extensions in ELisp, but it's not like Vimscript is a top-tier language. Emacs is hard to learn, but so's Vim.
I think it comes down to performance, especially startup time. Emacs developers have never cared much about it, and I think that's connected to its reputation for "bloat."
The death knell rang when Linux distros stopped distributing Emacs by default; Emacs isn't installed by default on Ubuntu or Fedora, say nothing of macOS or the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
If I were working on Emacs, my #1 goal would be to beat Vim on startup time--to get the first page of text to show up faster than Vim--and my #2 goal would be to convince the major distros to include Emacs by default.
Sadly, I don't think any of this will happen. Stallman is too far out of touch, not just with newbies, but even with active users of Emacs. As the article points out, he's never even used Org mode! https://lwn.net/ml/emacs-devel/[email protected]...
EDIT: I know you can do some non-default techniques to make Emacs start faster. But that won't get Emacs to be installed by default on popular distros. Installing more plugins won't make Emacs the quickest and easiest way to edit a file.
I think it comes down to performance, especially startup time. Emacs developers have never cared much about it, and I think that's connected to its reputation for "bloat."
The death knell rang when Linux distros stopped distributing Emacs by default; Emacs isn't installed by default on Ubuntu or Fedora, say nothing of macOS or the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
If I were working on Emacs, my #1 goal would be to beat Vim on startup time--to get the first page of text to show up faster than Vim--and my #2 goal would be to convince the major distros to include Emacs by default.
Sadly, I don't think any of this will happen. Stallman is too far out of touch, not just with newbies, but even with active users of Emacs. As the article points out, he's never even used Org mode! https://lwn.net/ml/emacs-devel/[email protected]...
EDIT: I know you can do some non-default techniques to make Emacs start faster. But that won't get Emacs to be installed by default on popular distros. Installing more plugins won't make Emacs the quickest and easiest way to edit a file.