Just FYI, dired without any configuring or customizing is pretty rad, especially with wdired-mode for editing filenames. You don't need to read this blog post to benefit from it.
I use emacs almost every day, and it's a continual source of frustration that the community seems allergic to sane defaults.
If the editor ships a built in file manager, that file manager should not require explicit configuration to open e.g. a jpeg in an image viewer by default. We've had `xdg-open` for years now, it's kind of absurd how far behind emacs is in so many ways.
I think that’s what many enjoy—and probably why many other steer away from—Emacs: its malleability. It has some defaults that are grounded in some usecase that have persisted for decades, and to change them would take hours of arguing on the mailing list.. or you could just change the defaults yourself to your liking.
Pressing “X” with your point at the file should essentially do this, no? Well, at least give you the option to open said file in an external program. Otherwise, yes, pressing “RET” will assume you want to open it in emacs, I think that is sane. But like BeetleB says, I have no issue opening an image in emacs (unless I’m on windows)
That said, lack of sane defaults elsewhere is indeed a bit frustrating, (see: littering backup and auto save files everywhere. It would be much nicer to throw it in a ‘temp’ directory within .emacs.d or similar)
Also, wgrep-mode for editing files is amazing
If the editor ships a built in file manager, that file manager should not require explicit configuration to open e.g. a jpeg in an image viewer by default. We've had `xdg-open` for years now, it's kind of absurd how far behind emacs is in so many ways.
That said, lack of sane defaults elsewhere is indeed a bit frustrating, (see: littering backup and auto save files everywhere. It would be much nicer to throw it in a ‘temp’ directory within .emacs.d or similar)
I believe opening within Emacs should be the default - as many Emacs users aim to do everything within Emacs.
See this submission from a day ago:
https://en.andros.dev/blog/06bfd107/emacs-is-a-lispboard/