> "But Vim and Emacs could be much more popular if they put some effort into improving the first-time experience."
I think you are wrong about that. Distributions of vim that aim to do this (such as Janus, or Cream) get no significant traction. Things like GVim exist, but the only place I've ever seen anybody use them is on systems that don't have a modern terminal emulator installed.
Any attempt to "friendly-ify" the default Vim experience would do nothing but alienate current Vim users. The temptation to throw all your existing users under the bus to reach a hypothetical larger market should be avoided; giving in to those temptations kills open source projects. Open source developers should feel a loyalty to their users, not meaningless "sales" numbers.
I think you are wrong about that. Distributions of vim that aim to do this (such as Janus, or Cream) get no significant traction. Things like GVim exist, but the only place I've ever seen anybody use them is on systems that don't have a modern terminal emulator installed.
Any attempt to "friendly-ify" the default Vim experience would do nothing but alienate current Vim users. The temptation to throw all your existing users under the bus to reach a hypothetical larger market should be avoided; giving in to those temptations kills open source projects. Open source developers should feel a loyalty to their users, not meaningless "sales" numbers.