tjpnz 11 hours ago

You can learn Emacs in one day. Every day!

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  • theflyinghorse 11 hours ago

    I've spent 2 month trying out emacs and I feel like I sort of scratched the surface. It's like the deeper you look the more you realize how much more there is

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    • iLemming 2 hours ago

      I think the problem that most beginners try to explore the editor features, instead of focusing on main fundamental truth about Emacs - it's not just an editor, it's a Lisp system with a built-in editor.

      I think focusing on understanding how Lisp drives Emacs can remarkably speed up the pace of learning it. Every key press and button click hooks up to a Lisp function. Even complex keyboard macros translate to Lisp command sequences.

      1. Figure out structural editing commands to move s-expressions freely - those parens only feel annoying initially, later they become friendly.

      2. Understand REPL-driven development - any expression can be evaled in-place.

      3. Try the build-in profiler.

      4. Learn the debugger.

      5. Use the describe- commands. Emacs can "describe" to you every key, function, command, symbol, input methods, themes, fonts, characters, etc.

      Emacs is really not about "what it can or cannot do" in general sense. It's all about "what you can do with it". Learn some basic elisp - and you will be able to achieve a lot.

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      • BeetleB an hour ago

        I'm going to give a counterpoint to this (common) take.

        I was an Emacs power user for almost a decade before I learned Emacs Lisp. I knew just the bare minimum to populate my .emacs file, and occasionally copied others' config snippets.

        No need to rush into learning Elisp.

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    • mimischi 10 hours ago

      My biggest revelation was when I realized how to use Emacs to learn about Emacs. Knowing where to look up function, variable definitions etc was an eye opener in my understanding of how things work and are piped together

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      • hbogert 10 hours ago

        There was a time when this was the obvious thing to do when making systems. Sadly that's forgotten. Manpages to read on cli tooling is the same thing of course. Yet people rather go to another window, the browser, and go to a ad-driven website and get the same output as the manpage would give.

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        • koiueo 9 hours ago

          These days people rather switch to a browser window, open an LLM of their choice in a new tab and in verbose English ask "how do I do X in this popular program Y?".

          Then get a hallucinated answer and come to you to complain about a missing cli option, while it's literally there, in their terminal, just one -h away. True story (had to vent out, thanks for listening).

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    • mijoharas 2 hours ago

      Im going on a decade now, and there's always still more (in a good way)!

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