> Beware - Emacs is highly addictive and it might easily consume years of your life!
I agree with that wholeheartedly. Don’t get me wrong—I love emacs and I’ll be the first to talk your ear off about it.
But it’s a hobby, and not necessarily worth the time investment compared with other editors, if you’re looking for something that “just works” and has all the modern features.
Now that you've gotten the ritual disclaimers out of the way, though, Emacs time investment pays off big time. Survivorship bias, sure, but you certainly don't need to go full Colonel Kurtz into the Emacs rabbit-hole like Bohzidar, before you can reap benefits- it really is a gift that keeps on giving.
I just spent a couple days getting my corporate e-mail to work in emacs(settled on gnus+offlineimap+notmuch).
I even got syntax highlighting for patches and wrote some lisp to link up notmuch search results to gnus- so I can search for an e-mail and find the whole thread easily.
Of course, I could have just started evolution and been done, but this stuff is fun!
Agreed. I find myself struggling to recommend it to newcomers - it is just so esoteric to anyone used to ctrl+C for copy. But I can't imagine life without it.
At my last job, I was forced to use PyCharm. Fine an IDE it probably is, I hated every second of it. Within 3 days I ditched it for Emacs.
I assume you're being sarcastic, but an Emacs beginner has no idea what 'CUA mode' is.
Jokes aside, Emacs UX is just completely different to anything modern. Computer users not enlightened by Emacsen try to press Esc to get out of trouble, assume scrolling doesn't move the cursor, etc. Chorded keybindings are a mind-blow, and they have their own further pitfalls too.
I either got used to Emacs behaviours, or find them superior (can't tell which one) but frankly I think they might be a big deterrent. For new users, it must be like getting into a car where all the controls are different. Brake and accelerator swapped, clutch is hand-operated (and woe to you if you've only driven automatic), stems are swapped, and some vital controls are operated by pressing buttons with the top of your head. Computer programs of the past 20 years have some basic common behaviours that are almost synonymous with basic IT skills, and Emacs diverges in many of them.
I adopted Emacs in the relative modernity of 2012, when I joined a mostly-airgapped Linux environment and needed a power editor. I persevered and grew to love Emacs, but frankly if I could have downloaded VS Code or Pycharm, I probably would have done.
> an Emacs beginner has no idea what 'CUA mode' is.
It’s in the menu bar, under “Options” → “Use CUA Keys (Cut/Paste with C-x/C-c/C-v)”, beside an on/off checkbox. How could it possibly be made to be any easier to find and understand (except to make it enabled by default)?
There have been some discussions on the mailing list about prompting users when emacs first runs to figure out whether they want CUA, evil, or normal bindings. I think that would go a long way to easing the initial “I can’t even write text” experience that is often emacs out of the box for new users.
But it breaks others’ preferred behavior. It also does not play nice with keyboard macros. Emacs is software way older than most Junior developers and needs to cater so many very different use cases and extension libraries.
The way this was proposed was, only prompt for the modern-user-friendly options like CUA mode if the user doesn't have an ~/.emacs.d/init.el or .emacs file, which makes some sense to me. Emacs isn't the kind of thing you run on remote machines and expect it to be at all like the one you have locally (like you can mostly do with vi).
The others who prefer Emacs's default behavior are a dwindling constituency of the user base. Eventually they will all be dead, and the only people becoming users of Emacs (if any) will be people used to the Windows/Mac way of doing things.
You have to meet your users where they are, otherwise you won't have users. For desktop applications, that means using the standard interface conventions and shortcuts for common operations.
> Computer users not enlightened by Emacsen try to press Esc to get out of trouble
That actually does work, if you press ESC three times. It’s a special case in Emacs, added just to make it easier for people who hammer the ESC key to abort.
For me it closes all but 1 window, hardly what I'd hope for.
True, though, that it gets me out of the mini-buffer, same as C-g. I didn't know that works - nice.
Btw, here's another thing. How many times as a beginner was I stuck in the mini-buffer and had no idea what's going on? The new editors have some kind of command palette, which is vaguely similar, but I don't think you can get stuck in it.
You know what CUA mode is if you're older than 50. CUA mode was introduced in our 20's :-) If younger, you just can't now. It's like saying let's do it the "CORBA" way. Only the old guard will know...
I agree with that wholeheartedly. Don’t get me wrong—I love emacs and I’ll be the first to talk your ear off about it.
But it’s a hobby, and not necessarily worth the time investment compared with other editors, if you’re looking for something that “just works” and has all the modern features.