[$] Making Emacs popular again

The Emacs editor predatesLinux, and was once far more popular, but it has fallen into relative obscurity over the years.In a mega-thread on the emacs-devel mailing list, participants discussedvarious ideas for making Emacs more "attractive", in both aestheticand in "appealing to more users" senses of that term. Any improvementsto Emacs in that regard have numerous hurdles to overcome, however. Thereare technical questions and, naturally, licensing considerations, butthere is also the philosophical question of what it is, exactly, that stopsthe venerable text editor from being more popular.