Emacs is a pretty bad user interface but at least it's still the same user interface

The year is twenty twenty five. (Almost twenty twenty six). For the majority of the last ten years, emacs has been the primary window through which i accessed my computer. There were periods, some longer than other periods, during which i used other software. But for most of that time, emacs has been at the heart of it all.

I am happy to admit that emacs is not the flashiest interface available for most tasks. I am also happy to admit that for many of the things i use it for, it is not the best. But every time a piece of software i thought i loved changes in some fundamental way, and makes it extraordinarily difficult to get back to the way things were before, with no research-backed justification for why they made that change, and no explanation at all for why everyone else should get on board with that change other than some passive-aggressive volunteer forum moderators who feel the need to explain to everyone with better things to do than wonder where the file menu went how they should take their heads out the asses and stop fighting progress— every time this exact same series of events happens, i go and visit my nearest neighbourhood search engine and search for the name of that software, with a little deflated “emacs” appended.

The most recent victim was zotero, which is an excellent piece of software which i will probably keep recommending to people for the foreseeable future, because despite their recent, questionable design decisions i would still rather see everyone who writes in an academic setting using a reference manager than not. But for whatever reason, zotero decided to mess with my titlebars, and for that, as well as the general sluggishness that has been creeping in with each new update, i wanted to see if there was an acceptable solution in emacs.

In fact there were several, but i decided to write my own little functions to do what i wanted. What have i lost? All the smoothness and integration that makes me want to recommend zotero to other people in the first place. I no longer have a browser extension, or automatically fetched metadata, or full text search. I could try and justify these omissions and say i never used them anyway, but that would be a lie. All i can say is that the new system has some advantages i appreciate, and the fact that i will not have to change anything, and nothing will change if i don’t change it, for a decade or more, is more than enough to satisfy me at the moment.

There is no reason for an interface to change over time, unless to improve it. In terms of interfaces, what improves one is whether it becomes clearer and easier for the person engaging with it to use it. This is not an exact science, but it can be measured to some degree. Unfortunately, those measurements seem to have been forgotten or otherwise gamed.

In general, i support things like the cua guidelines. I wish some parts of emacs were tidier. But at the same time, by eschewing such guidelines, emacs has been able to maintain a sort of internal consistency. Very slowly, things get improved. I like the new completion frameworks, and the touchscreen support, the smooth scrolling and org mode. They work well together and subtly enhance the core offering, like spices rather than a whole new vegetable. And, controversial as it sometimes is, it takes a long time for new features to be enabled by default. No-one updates emacs one day to see a totally new interface they have to learn. They can find it by themselves, if and when they need it.

And if there is a breaking change? Well, i haven’t met one yet. Sometimes i’ll update and get a warning that some function has been deprecated. Then i can look at the function documentation and it’ll tell me what i should be using instead. If i have the time, i can make the change right then, but if not, i’ll ignore it, and emacs wil continue to quietly remind me when i load it up, but keep doing what i want it to do regardless.

And so, as so many applications get steadily worse, i end up building more and more half-baked shadows of them inside of that one application which keeps shuffling along, quietly encouraging me, and not ever turning around with a smirk that says, you relied on me, you got used to me, and now it’s all change. What are you going to do? You can’t fight progress forever.