> I think you will make Emacs appealing to users when you start asserting it is appealing to users
I've worked with a lot of Emacs fans but everyone describes it as having a hefty learning curve. If you tell people it's appealing and the first experience is unpleasant, all you're going to do is convince them that you aren't a reliable source of advice. I think it would be much better to focus on easing that initial stage and explaining it a powerful tool which requires some up-front investment.
Remember that Emacs is competing with things like Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime Text, etc. If you tell people that it's easy they're going to try it, bounce off, and conclude you have no idea what you're talking about. If, instead, you tell them what you like about it more than those others they might find they agree with you.
Speaking as someone that has bounced off the likes of notepad... I think you are overstating the case.
I'm not saying to merely claim it and call it a day. I'm saying claim it while showing people how to use it. Make it a dialog that doesn't begin with, our way is harder. It isn't harder. Just different.
Exactly. Whenever a new developer asks what editor I use, I emphasize that while I use emacs, it has a huge learning curve. It has different conventions than any other text editor, because it predates those conventions.
I would like to understand why vim does not seem to have this problem? I guess as stated below, it's just they way it is marketed. Because the way I see it, emacs is much easier to start out with than vim.
If I start emacs, I can navigate around the text with the arrow keys, the way I would expect from most other text entry systems. Then I can just type stuff. I can click at points in the text to navigate there, just like in notepad or anywhere else.
OTOH in vim it is nothing like that. Nothing is even remotely familiar. Yet there are much more vim users than emacs users. So I don't buy it that the learning curve is the problem.
> I would like to understand why vim does not seem to have this problem?
That’s seriously begging the question — I mean, there’s a pretty popular running joke about quitting vim and it’s been many years since I’ve heard any recommend it as easy to get started with. In the 90s people suggested it due to Emacs hitting memory constraints but most CPUs now have more cache now than those computers had.
I know, people are joking about how it's not usable. But still there are a lot of people using it! So maybe it's not actually an issue for adoption, so I wonder why this argument comes up with emacs then, which, in my opinion, is OOTB not as weird as vim for someone unfamiliar with either of them.
I've worked with a lot of Emacs fans but everyone describes it as having a hefty learning curve. If you tell people it's appealing and the first experience is unpleasant, all you're going to do is convince them that you aren't a reliable source of advice. I think it would be much better to focus on easing that initial stage and explaining it a powerful tool which requires some up-front investment.