
Nearly everyone who is new to Emacs hates it passionately (2014) - pcr910303
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1mt8a5/nearly_everyone_who_is_new_to_emacs_hates_it/
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kstenerud
I've used both vim and emacs in various incarnations over the course of 30
years. After all that time, I hate emacs, and I tolerate vim because sometimes
I need a remote editor. Are they powerful? Yes. Are they useful for the things
I do as a developer? Not really.

For everything not remote, there's sublime text or a real IDE.

~~~
bobbylarrybobby
I’m not sure why someone would use vim over an IDE with vim key bindings

~~~
j88439h84
VSCode-Vim is much slower than Vim, and lacks plugins like targets.vim.

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ksaj
It also doesn't do Lisp. So that keeps me from venturing in that direction as
well. I just use a well set up vim - fast and easy on the eyes.

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mrbonner
I use a real IDE for my day to day programming work. I was forcing myself to
use Vim for everything but failed pretty hard.

I heard James Gosling once said something along the lines of: I don’t
understand the cult-like behavior of using a text based editor to program
nowadays. There is something about the 70s editors that pump up programmers’
testosterone level.

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gumby
I have never understood this. You only need a handful of commands and you can
do anything. Then you can learn a few more as you go. c-f (forward char), c-n
(next line) etc...really not much to know.

As for incremental learning: just the other day I was programming with a
colleague and taught him a new command. I've only been using Emacs since 1978;
he was using it before I was. But even after more than 40 years of emacsing he
said, "wow, wish I'd known that command earlier". But even without it he was
very productive.

I think people who teach someone emacs by starting out with fancy init files,
tons of libraries and by emphasizing programmability etc are doing a big
disservice. Its very incremental nature is an enormous part of its power.

My artist wife had Emacs as her first editor and still misses it.

~~~
mickeyp
I find it easier to tell people to not focus on learning Emacs's own movement
keys to start with. For most, it adds a lot of confusion on top of learning
the terminology and idiosyncrasies.

Starting out with the arrows keys first and then slowly incorporating the
movement keys into their workflow will let them focus with getting on with
what we all use Emacs for, ultimately: gettin' things done.

The second thing I teach them -- and I make a big deal about it in my book --
is teaching beginners how to ask Emacs the right questions: how to look up the
definitions of keys, functions, etc. as that is the second-biggest stumbling
block: not understanding what something does or how to rediscover that command
or key you forgot.

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NelsonMinar
Emacs is a UI paradigm from the 1980s when character-addressable virtual TTYs
were an exciting new innovation. Finally I could do something better than Edit
and Correct my Tape(1)! It is cruel to teach it to people new to computing
when we've had better UI paradigms for 20+ years.

(Before you flame; I'm an old emacs geek and still have the multi-kilobyte
.emacs and damaged wrists to prove it. I even had a brief bit of open source
fame with an emacs mode for HTML I wrote back in 1994. I've moved on.)

1
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_\(text_editor\))

~~~
cjauvin
The mix of the old and the new seems to be quite the dominant paradigm these
days: I'm mostly working on complex web development projects, and using Emacs
to seamlessly navigate the sea of mostly text-based environments (JS, Python,
PHP, bash, git, docker, multiple configuration environments, etc.) simply
proves an invaluable asset. I've tried several times to "move on" (most
recently to VSCode, which is really quite good), but I've always been
gravitating back to Emacs.

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ajlburke
I loved EMACS when I first tried it. Granted, that was in around 2001 and my
day job had required using a terrible bloated version of IBM WebSphere
Application Developer which would leak 16 megs of RAM every time I tried to
open an HTML page, forcing me to completely restart my 640meg Dell several
times a day. EMACS, in Terminal.app on the then-new OSX, was so refreshingly
fast and light (and comparitively good looking) that I finally felt like I
could do some real work for a change.

I know that sounds kind of ridiculous, considering EMACS' history - but you
never had to use that vintage IBM JSP suite!

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zaiste
Shameless Plug: I'm doing some Emacs introductory videos on YouTube [1]. It's
specifically oriented for newcomers.

I fell in love with the Emacs Doom [2], a distribution made for Vimmers - this
way you can draw from two ancient sources of power at the same time... ;)

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhXZp00uXBk4np17N39Wv...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhXZp00uXBk4np17N39WvB80zgxlZfVwj)
[2]: [https://github.com/hlissner/doom-
emacs](https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs)

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decasteve
The "hates it passionately" sentiment is not quite right. Emacs is a complex
tool which requires time and effort to learn. Most who take the time to learn
it see the value of it even if they chose to use a different tool. Nobody
expects a lathe to be as easy to use as a hammer and screwdriver.

~~~
ksaj
> Nobody expects a lathe to be as easy to use as a hammer and screwdriver.

Especially for connecting pieces of wood together.

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anotheryou
Spacemacs makes it slightly better, especially if you are coming from vim.

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AnthonBerg
A lot better, for some!

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spodek
As a new user, I love emacs. I've only been using it since the 90s.

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dirkt
As a newbie, a long time ago, I had been exposed to vi and emacs about at the
same time. I couldn't find a way to get out of vi. In emacs, there was a small
text message that explained how to get help, and how to do a tutorial. I've
worked through this, and have been using emacs ever since.

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da_chicken
I thought "passionate hatred" was the first step in learning any new editor or
IDE.

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kkarakk
vscode was honestly my first experience in 8 years of coding where i went -
"huh, i don't have to learn much and i don't hate this"

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jm__87
Visual Studio is absolutely amazing and I won't code without it. On top of
that, you can always install VsVim if you want some vim functionality while
retaining everything that is great about VS (this is what I use).

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mathgenius
> With the surge in Vim usage, we really need to do something about the
> initial experience of Emacs

Um.. It took me 10 years to get over the initial horror of vim, but after
that, it was awesome.

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jsilence
Probably, but emacs will always be there for you. You can quit it and dabble
with others, but you can always come back and like old wine, it will have
gotten better.

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kabwj
I’ve tried to use Emacs as an IDE for Python and Go but I find it hard to find
a good tutorial on how to set it up on Windows.

Also, how do I reload the .emacs.d file without completely restarting Emacs?

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lkrubner
Run the command “eval-buffer” on .emacs.d which will in effect reload it. Save
this as a command in .emacs.d and bind it to some easy key, then you can do it
again easily

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singularity2001
Opposite experience: I loved it so much that I wasted 50% of the project
'optimizing' emacs. Luckily the next project was group dictated Intellij.

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new_realist
This is a generational gap. To the young, Emacs looks old and smells funky.

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alimw
It looked old and smelled funky thirty years ago. So unless you're extending
the definition of "young" well into middle age, not really.

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klingonopera
Notepad++ is my editor of choice.

Windows-only, though, unfortunately...

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masonic
(2014)

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exabrial
...that and Nano are the first things I uninstall, despite knowing that
"technically" they're supposed to be better than vim. Devil you know I guess!

