RE: (emacs) Intro [was: Making Emacs popular again with a video]

[Stefan Kangas]

excalamus@tutanota.com writes:

> - Strictly speaking GNU Emacs and Emacs are distinct.  What
> recommendations do you have for navigating the distinction?  Or should
> we *not* make a distinction?  Maybe I'm just being pedantic.

There is an interesting history here, and I'm as fascinated by this as
the next guy.  But in this day and age, GNU Emacs has completely
eclipsed all other versions of Emacs.

I'm not sure the benefit of bringing up that history here, especially
since there are many good articles and resources that discuss this
elsewhere.  It risks confusing or even sending users looking for other
Emacsen (likely a dead-end).

My conclusion is that we should avoid discussing other versions of Emacs
in this introduction.

> Maybe we should gloss over the distinction in the manual text
> and include a separate history node?

I don't see why not.  The only problem I know of is that the manual is
already very long in printed form.

> - Terminology, like "Emacsen", exists within the community (EmacsWiki,
> etc.) which is confusing if you conflate GNU Emacs with Emacs.  I was
> certainly confused by this.  Maybe add such terminology to the
> glossary?

Maybe EmacsWiki should just be refocused on GNU Emacs, instead.

> - Other Emacs are referenced within GNU Emacs's code-base.  Running
> grep on my Emacs install turns up 281 matches for "xemacs".  I doubt
> that's going to trip many people up, but who knows.

We have been working on reducing the number of such instances.  I think
some things just needs work, and in some cases (e.g. cc-mode) it's not
clear to me if the maintainer wants to drop XEmacs support just yet.

> Absolutely!  I'm so stinkin' excited to be working with you (all) on
> this.  Thank you for taking the time to share your perspective and
> experience!

Happy to help, thanks for working on this.  You had some specific
questions but I couldn't think of a good answer, so I'll leave that in
the hope that someone else will.

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas