What is Enki's unique (selling) proposition?

[rockiger]

I wonder what is Enki's USP? I would like to create a compelling slogan/USP that can be communicated on sites like Hacker News. My personal goal is to grow the userbase/ecosystem of Enki, that more interesting features are created via plugins.

The Enki website states the following features:

• User friendly. Intuitive interface. Works out of the box. You don’t have to read a lot of docs.
• Hacker friendly. Work as quickly as possible. Navigate efficiently without your mouse.
• Advanced. You invent software. An editor helps you focus on inventing, instead of fighting with your tools.
• Extensible. Operating systems are designed for running applications. Enki is designed for running plugins.
• Cross platform. Use your habitual editor on any OS. Tested on Linux and Windows. Users report that Enki works Mac OS X.
• High quality. No long list of fancy features. But, what is done, is done well.
• Open source. Created, tested, and designed for the community, by the community, and with the community.

For me, it seems a lot of these features can be said for most text editors. What sets Enki apart?

My personal reasons to use/hack Enki are:

• Enki is cross-platform (runs on Linux) => requirement, but many editors are
• is extensible with plugins => hackable
• is written in Python (easy to learn, interpreted, popular) => hackable
• is NOT build on web technologies (kills Atom and vsCode) => I am fed up with bloated editors
• is open source (kills Sublime) => requirement, but many editors are

If I would have to boil it down to a slogan I would say: A hackable text editor built without web technologies.

What do you guys think? What is your reason to use and hack Enki?

[bjones1]

Personally, the primary use for Enki is its unique ability to support Literate Programming. (I'm biased, since I'm the author of those abilities). My slogan would be: "Enki enables your to write programs, communicating the reasoning behind the code your wrote, rather than simply coding."

[andreikop]

Hi, guys I've seen the issue, will respond when having enough time

[andreikop]

Hi @rockiger , you've touched very good issue. Enki would probably be more popular now, if I paid more attention to marketing than to coding. USP is very important. Sublime makes wow effect by it's minimap, multiple selections and rectangular editing. But actually the features are useless.

For me, Enki's USP for hackers is availability of

1. good programming language
2. good GUI framework

I.e. Sublime lacks 2. It is generally good, but editing config files to configure the editor is a pain. Enki plugin is able to construct pretty GUI config dialogue, because can use PyQt. Atom lacks 1. And 2. IMHO

For users I've never tried to create a USP. Just make a very good editor. And, for me, Enki is unique because of the best text editing user experience. Basic operations like open a file, edit text, search-replace, navigation. But, it is difficult to explain in the marketing texts.

[andreikop]

I wouldn't like to use text A hackable text editor built without web technologies. It contains clear comparison with Atom. For cruel and greedy business it is probably acceptable to advertise products with slogans "We are better than other brand" or even "Other brand is bad". But we are making an open source project which is going to make the developers happier. Atom also does. I wouldn't treat Atom as an enemy.

[rockiger]

@andreikop Ok, I wouldn't treat anything as an enemy. It's only for the user to know what they are getting when they use Enki. What slogan what you like? A programmable text editor built with Qt and Python?

Btw, if you want, I am happy to help you out with marketing.

[andreikop]

I think users don't really care what is programming language and GUI framework. The editor just must be good. Contributors do care. But contributors will check technical details

Any help is welcome!

[rockiger]

I would assume that in the case of a programming editor every user (especially an early user) is a potential contributor and vice versa.

Being able to use Python to extend the editor is the central feature, in my opinion. Because then (almost) everything else can added by the users.

The editor just must be good.

What does this mean for in the case of Enki?

[abitrolly]

I think this - Hacker friendly. Work as quickly as possible. Navigate efficiently without your mouse. - is a valid point. UX that allows to edit and run code right after the start without any additional mouse clicking is what I find awesome. This thing is that made vim so popular - when it is invoked, user has simple shortcuts to navigate to the problem. Most other editors require repetitive mouse clicks etc.

If I could design things, I would do little flash on the cursor position when Enki starts. Then I would try to create a transparent "glass" overlay over editor area with some simple single-key shortcuts for navigation - like go to line 2233, end file, next function, error from clipboard, whatever.. with Enter key breaking the glass.

[abitrolly]

I would also lock scroll events from touchpad to current content area - not to mouse focus, and have a modifier key like control to disable this behavior.