> Why would you even bother making Emacs look like Kakoune?
Because somebody wanted the Kakoune core editor behavior combined with the world of features emacs gives you.
> Funny how it seems a lot of Emacs developer time is spent a) making it look like / act like something else
Somebody found this useful. Would you have preferred that this person didn't do any of this at all?
> and b) making it do things unrelated to editing text.
Yes. Unlike vim and kakoune and others, emacs is much more than a text editor.
> There is no focus.
What focus? Somebody wanted to do this for themselves. There's no "emacs, inc" that sets the focus that all devs follow. This is how free software works.
> It's good that it can do a lot but it doesn't do any of those things well
I'm going to go out on a limb, and guess you aren't an emacs user? It does most of those things fantastically well.
You're clearly not involved in the development of emacs, and your perception of the "focus" is based on talking to newbies. Respectfully, go read emacs-devel to find out where the focus is.
go read emacs-devel to find out where the focus is.
If by focus you mean distilled yak shaving, then emacs-devel is the
place to be. Emacs is going nowhere because elisp makes it too easy to
work on the plugins relative to the C core which was showing its age 15
years ago.
The C core is getting a feature to compile elisp to native code in the forthcoming Emacs 28. I've yet to try it, but I understand it offers a significant speed boost.
It's certainly true that the core C codebase has some major parts that are aging poorly, but it's not true to say it's going nowhere.
(As one who has shaved plenty of yaks and occasionally reads emacs-devel, I'd say it's the place for distilled bikeshedding, not yak shaving.)
> ... but it's not true to say it's going nowhere.
I'm using the "native comp" (of elisp to native code) since it's available (years already now? Don't remember exactly but a long time). That, combined with a fast JSON parsing lib and LSP and Emacs is definitely not just the Emacs of 15 years ago.
Other things happened to the Emacs world too: ivy/avy/counsel (and maybe lispy and hydra) are stuff I couldn't live without anymore.
Because somebody wanted the Kakoune core editor behavior combined with the world of features emacs gives you.
> Funny how it seems a lot of Emacs developer time is spent a) making it look like / act like something else
Somebody found this useful. Would you have preferred that this person didn't do any of this at all?
> and b) making it do things unrelated to editing text.
Yes. Unlike vim and kakoune and others, emacs is much more than a text editor.
> There is no focus.
What focus? Somebody wanted to do this for themselves. There's no "emacs, inc" that sets the focus that all devs follow. This is how free software works.
> It's good that it can do a lot but it doesn't do any of those things well
I'm going to go out on a limb, and guess you aren't an emacs user? It does most of those things fantastically well.