Re:Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)
by brudgers on Sunday January 09, 2022 @12:37PM
(#29865468)
I don't understand why Emacs's features aren't exposed via context menus
Mainly I think it is a matter of efficiency...on the implementation side. I mean the hard part about learning something like org-mode (or emacs itself) is conceptual not key bindings.
It's this way because org-mode (or emacs itself) is a powerful tool that users use for decades. The tooling is intended to reward expertise and experience. No amount of context menus will change the fact that the tools are deep and conceptual mastery will take more than a few hours (never mind the thirty seconds the typical app has to engage the user).
Org-mode was written for it's author's use. It was written to get things done. Easy onboarding and massive investment in graphical UI for non-experts wouldn't do that. It requires work to learn. That's true of anything hard.
It's not that I don't sympathize...though it probably can be interpreted that way. It's that using emacs (and org-mode) is analogous to playing the piano, not playing the stereo.
Finally, I while I get the appeal of things like spacemacs, I think it's mostly a distraction. The documentation and tooling is by it's nature derivative...it is by it's nature extra work. Even worse it's extra work that's driven by ideology. Worser still, it's extra work driven by the ideology of Vim versus Emacs. And worst of all, it's rational is emacs-is-too-hard-to-learn.
Emacs is hard to learn, but not too hard. It's harder to learn than a sixteen week college course. But that's most things in the working world.
Mainly I think it is a matter of efficiency...on the implementation side. I mean the hard part about learning something like org-mode (or emacs itself) is conceptual not key bindings.
It's this way because org-mode (or emacs itself) is a powerful tool that users use for decades. The tooling is intended to reward expertise and experience. No amount of context menus will change the fact that the tools are deep and conceptual mastery will take more than a few hours (never mind the thirty seconds the typical app has to engage the user).
Org-mode was written for it's author's use. It was written to get things done. Easy onboarding and massive investment in graphical UI for non-experts wouldn't do that. It requires work to learn. That's true of anything hard.
It's not that I don't sympathize...though it probably can be interpreted that way. It's that using emacs (and org-mode) is analogous to playing the piano, not playing the stereo.
Finally, I while I get the appeal of things like spacemacs, I think it's mostly a distraction. The documentation and tooling is by it's nature derivative...it is by it's nature extra work. Even worse it's extra work that's driven by ideology. Worser still, it's extra work driven by the ideology of Vim versus Emacs. And worst of all, it's rational is emacs-is-too-hard-to-learn.
Emacs is hard to learn, but not too hard. It's harder to learn than a sixteen week college course. But that's most things in the working world.