[hexa00]

I'm going to approach this as a pure social thing.

To me emacs fits in a way because it fits the kinda misfit/hacker mentality I had back when I started playing with computers/software.

I found emacs and linux as the coolest things in the world while everyone was thinking computers were somehow for unwanted geeks in a basement.

And honestly that did not feel me with a need to be cool, wanted or popular.

Instead I developed a sense that having to learn things the hard way, fail and continue until I got it right without regard to what others thought had a super high value.

And to me that's what emacs symbolizes, it doesn't need to be popular or cool and maybe it will die at some point but even if that would be unfortunate it will have been central to a generation of free thinking, intelligent programmers.

And now it's 2020 it's cool to be a programmer, and we're awash with learn to be a dev the easy way seminars and here's how you can deploy your app in 2 clicks...

And that's good but it doesn't mean emacs has to be that way.

I think it is way way easier instead to create a new editor with the same free software mentality. Maybe that's Theia under the Eclipse Foundation, maybe it's something else. But migrating emacs to a VSCode like popular idea is crazy, you just can't migrate all of that.

Full disclosure I worked on GDB (using emacs) and Theia (a vscode like editor) and used emacs for 15+ years mainly doing c/cpp and org mode.