Re: GNU Emacs raison d'etre

[Arthur Miller]

Karl Fogel <address@hidden> writes:

> On 14 May 2020, Richard Stallman wrote:
>>  > * Tell newcomers up front that Emacs really starts to be worth it
>>  > * after a few years, not a few weeks.
>>
>>I don't believe that is true.  It is an exaggeration.
>
> Well, it's not a rhetorical exaggeration, in any case. That is, it is my 
> actual
> belief, based on observation. (It could be wrong, of course, but just to be
> clear, it wasn't an exaggeration for the sake of effect.)
>
> Different people will naturally learn at different rates, depending on their
> aptitude and environment. The best environment is to have an Emacs expert 
> nearby
> in person, who can occasionally watch the newcomer edit and point out faster
> ways to do things, point out ways to ask Emacs for help, etc. But even in that
> kind of environment, with a talented newcomer, I don't think I've seen it take
> less than approximately a year to get to the point where they are doing better
> with Emacs than they would have done with some less extensible, less capable
> text editor.

To me it took about 15 years to realize full potential of Emacs. I am
using Emacs since around year '99, 2000, since university. The first few
months were a sincere frustration, but Emacs, was the most powerful
editor installed on university server (Sun ray with Solaris at time) so
I opted for it. The alternative was Nedit, or something that was
included in CDE and OpenDesktop (or what was the name of Suns OpenLook
thing). My compiler course teacher used the editor included with
OpenDesktop. I used Emacs in OpenDesktop environment since CDE was
crawlingly slow as soon as there were more then five persons logged into
server. Most of people on our course were using Nedit since it was most
similar to what they had at home on Windows, some of us used Emacs. I
went through the frustration, learned Emacs shortcuts and so on, just
because one teacher told us on Java course, that Emacs is recommended
since it is most advanced editor we had on servers. It was funny to see
people identing their code, we were everybody sitting and tabbing through
each line of the file because nobody knew how to mark entire file and
ident it at once. I think it wasn't on refcard or something. You would
hear people clicking and tabbing (and annoying others) all the time.

Anyway, for longest years I was using Emacs just as-is, and just for
text editing. Only when I was really annoyed by something were I
looking on the internet how to change it and fix it. But then after
digging around for fixes i realized how Emacs can be used when I saw
configs of other people and what other people do with emacs and so on.

Now it is my main tool for the most stuff. I don't know if I am just not
talented, but I know I am extremelly pragmatic. I just want to do what I
feel is my current goal or task, I don't care for exploring stuff just
for exploration. I think doing work with a tool is more worth then
tinkering with the tool, so I was never really deeply interested to go
into Emacs in the beginning. I never really red the welcome screen in the
beginning, it was just an annoyance untill I learned how to turn it off
in my init file. Maybe some other people are more clever then I and read
that stuff, I was too lazy for it, I had stuff to do.

I dont' know if others are like me and just want to do their typing, or
if Emacs is nowdays better at introducing itself, but I remember my
first time with it, and it was annoying.

I agree, with everything you said, and I think how fast people will
learn depends probably on how they are exposed to Emacs. If one is on
his own, like we were, then one might miss lots of good stuff with Emacs
because it is hidden quite deeply and need quite some scratching under
the surface. Maybe the inital approach to Emacs just as a text editor
like any other was the biggest problem, since Emacs isn't just a text
editor like any other :-). I don't know. Blame me, but for me it took
quite some time to realize power of Emacs.