I have used Emacs on almost every day of my life for about 10 years. I love Emacs and use those functions (as well as describe-key) fairly frequently. What's my favorite way to figure out how to do some random arcane thing in emacs?
Google.
It's often pleasantly surprised that some task I thought was esoteric is actually solved in the standard emacs libs, but the fact that I had to go to Google to find it doesn't say great things about the editor's discoverability. IMO, Emacs is about as discoverable as a dynamic programming language with a decent interactive interpreter such as ipython or irb.
I'm not saying it's the wrong tradeoff -- but if you want to learn Emacs you probably should read a book or two and ideally spend some time with a master. You really can't just bring it up and figure out that M-q will conveniently re-wrap the current paragraph or that M-^ joins the current line to the previous line and removes intermediate whitespace.
Google.
It's often pleasantly surprised that some task I thought was esoteric is actually solved in the standard emacs libs, but the fact that I had to go to Google to find it doesn't say great things about the editor's discoverability. IMO, Emacs is about as discoverable as a dynamic programming language with a decent interactive interpreter such as ipython or irb.
I'm not saying it's the wrong tradeoff -- but if you want to learn Emacs you probably should read a book or two and ideally spend some time with a master. You really can't just bring it up and figure out that M-q will conveniently re-wrap the current paragraph or that M-^ joins the current line to the previous line and removes intermediate whitespace.