I second to have choose Emacs as a main computing environment and since I often here the question "how much time ..." well...
I'd like to add a note: time can't be only measured in hours, days, etc. To learn Emacs enough to decide that's the way I'd like to interact and use my desktop it take a very little time, in around three month I start using Emacs as WM (EXWM), MUA (notmuch-emacs) in around two months with a "false start" on Mu4e, main docs solution, tramp, personal finance (ledger) etc
But the real point is: I do it when I like to do, as much as I like, in my free time. In other words I can start easily and grow as I wont and need, and this knowledge will survive for decades to came.
With commercial software you need to invest time (and money) before start, and after having reached a certain amount of knowledge you can't go further, you have to keep yourself up to date following upstream changes and you new knowledge have a very little value in the long run.
That distinction is important because too many people say "hey it took too much time to proficiently use FOSS" completely ignoring the big picture. Good time to learn FOSS is at school, when you have plenty of time and (in theory) you are willing to learn, after you get the benefit for the lifetime. Another good time is when you feel the need, in free time. You do not have to pay something in advance, you do not have "training", "diplomas" etc, you grow at your speed and desire, limitless.
> With commercial software you need to invest time (and money) before start, and after having reached a certain amount of knowledge you can't go further, you have to keep yourself up to date following upstream changes and you new knowledge have a very little value in the long run.
How's that different from learning to how use FOSS? Except the money investment part.
That commercial software is build normally to lock you in and lock out any possible evolution path, the learning curve is fixed: when you learnt a certain number of things "you are productive" and there is no more, no future.
On FOSS normally software offer many evolution paths, which means you have to learn few thing and you can start, using the software issue or desire arise and you learn new things in an ever grown knowledge that regularly pay off. Also standard terminology is normally used, for instance you never find FOSS project to invent terms like "BIA" (Cisco name for MAC address of a nic, "burn-in address") or "Enable mode", "write terminal" and things like that.
That is certainly true for some FOSS, but not for all. Many FOSS seems to not differ much from their non-FOSS equivalents, ex. LibreOffice, Firefox, Blender, Eclipse.
Accidentally all software you cite are born as commercial product: LibreOffice's origins are StartOffice, originally developed by StarWriter and after acquired by SUN; it became a FOSS project when SUN understand it can't profit anymore from it due to Microsoft Office popularity. Firefox was born as a commercial product (Netscape, originally an AOL product) that mimic Mosaic, but does not use it's free code. Blender was born as an internal product of NeoGeo, after distributed as a shareware by another company NaN and only after nan bankruptcy as a FOSS product. Eclipse born as a commercial IBM IDE, successors of VisualAge Micro Edition...
Of course, there are "recent" FOSS project with a design that take inspiration from commercial products, simply because that's the way authors think/know even if the code is free, but original FOSS software are another story.
That's not a real problem, if you call it "advanced statusbar" instead if minibuffer, split instead of windows, contents instead of buffer it's only a matter of name. And most of them are pretty intuitive.
Consider a thing: commercial always say "start with us is quick", and they do their best for that. Unfortunately they omit an important fact: start it's quick, if you already came from commercial environment witch is the most common case right now, but all the rest is a pain. And we normally start once in our life, but we have the entire life to live...
"no one but few do something" for me is not a bad thing per se, consider how many dictatorship exists around the world or in witch conditions most human live around the Earth: do you prefer being in the center of Gaussian which means being a poor man fighting for some bad food just to keep up in some dictatorship or you prefer western welfare and the least bit of democracy we have?
> That's not a real problem, if you call it "advanced statusbar" instead if minibuffer, split instead of windows, contents instead of buffer it's only a matter of name. And most of them are pretty intuitive.
vs.
> Also standard terminology is normally used, for instance you never find FOSS project to invent terms like "BIA" (Cisco name for MAC address of a nic, "burn-in address") or "Enable mode", "write terminal" and things like that.
This is called hipocrisy.
There's nothing "intuitive" about emacs terminology.
> This is called hipocrisy.
IMO it's simply a way to lock users in, like Cisco, like Oracle, like OpenBravo, like any other vendor try to do. Emacs simply was born many years ago, and kept going since that, why change terminology just to ease the newcomers make unhappy actual users?
> There's nothing "intuitive" about emacs terminology.
And so what? Emacs is an OS not a small single-purpose apps, did you expect to being able to learn it an a day clicking around? In my personal experience, as a hardcore vimmer for more than a decade, as someone who have used different OSes (casually born on Irix thanks to a present by a family friend, evolved on FreeBSD, RH/Fedora/Debian/Gentoo, Solaris, OpenSolaris, Ubuntu/NixOS) I have seen anywhere "non intuitive" terminology, and I'm still there...
What about slices instead of partition? What about /dev/ notation in various unices? What about pfexec vs su vs sudo vs pkexec vs ...?
Chad Fowler's "professional services barrier" label https://books.google.ie/books?id=ig9QDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT48&lpg=PT... is a fair stab at explaining some of the difference. Which isn't to say that the distinction is really black and white, especially for non-programmers or people who don't have a lot of time to invest in a particular kind of tool.
I used emacs for years to write code and latex documents only knowing the commands to open and close files, copy/paste, and quit. I started with emacs in lieu of vim because I think modal editing is an insane and clunky solution to a problem that no longer exists.
The documentation isn't really very good due to the arcane terminology that often contradicts modern de facto standards in naming things (frames, buffers, windows) so that's a real barrier.
Plus the ecosystem is full of half-baked treatises on the One True Way to set up your init file that don't really explain why they made their choices.
But you can easily get by in emacs with just the basics. Then you just add commands to your repertoire when you're ready.
then you can put your configs in an org file. using `use-package` means I can just copy/paste the file to new emacs and all my packages are auto installed etc..
#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
(use-package command-log-mode
:ensure t)
#+END_SRC
also, i highly recommend package `which-key` - it displays what commands are available along with their keypress.
Relatively little really. Probably the biggest individual customisation I have made is using Poet Theme (and its recommendations) to provide a good-looking GUI setup: https://github.com/kunalb/poet
I also have a basic (text only) init.el for when solely working in a Terminal environment.
My advice would be to perhaps start with just what is recommended to use Poet theme and then add what you need when you need it.
I've invested quite a bit of time into emacs, and while I do sometimes get frustrated at how the whole thing comes apart at the seams, I'm quite happy with it.
The way I see it, most time invested is not lost because emacs will probably be a part of my workflow for most of my life. I just got tired of getting proficient in yet another tool/editor, setting up various plugins and configs, only to have to do it all over again a few years later.
That said, I can see myself using other tools like VSCode when they're more appropriate.
Hard to say. I was a multi-year vim user. After converting to evil (vim mode for emacs), so I don't count that. I have spent at least 3 or so weekends tweaking things.
Every three months I spend a couple of hours thinking about what works and doesn't and going through my .emacs.d to make it better.
Basically, constant attention with heavy upfront costs.
Not OP. But if you are asking whether it is not possible for
a person to just sit down and start typing, surely time spent to get such great results is an investment.
