Re:Emacs Timeline
by digdugdirk on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @05:11PM
(#32336699)
Interesting perspective. What were you doing during the initial semi-helpless "why-does-this-hurt-so-much" phase of your emacs journey?
I find that people who take a slower long-term approach tend to be the ones that have a good experience. The moment someone really "needs" to get something done with emacs is usually when they shelve it for something more intuitive or more powerful out of the box.
>What were you doing during the initial semi-helpless "why-does-this-hurt-so-much" phase of your emacs journey?
I just looked at it as something to have fun with honestly. When I got stuck with something I just put it down for another time and I kept in mind that it's going to take a long time. And because I intentionally avoided copying things I didn't understand there honestly weren't that many moments of being super clueless. Also reminding myself that it was basically twice as old as I was at the time helped because you just can't expect to grok it immediately.
"More powerful"?
I think the biggest issue is that people are simply intimidated by learning Emacs from the bottom up themselves. It has an incredibly extensive tutorial baked in. It's almost completely self-referential which distinguishes it from most stuff people engage with today. And that's the crucial part I think because if you start copying other people's configs around or just ask stackoverflow I think you're not going to have a good time. Emacs for me was the first complex thing where I basically could have turned the internet off and just look at it myself.
I honestly credit Emacs with no less than curing me of a weird learned helplessness I got from my awful education that threw tools at me where I had no hope of understanding what they do.