Re: How to make Emacs popular again.

[Jean Louis]

* João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> [2020-10-07 14:23]:
> My experience was very close to Gregory's.  I also didn't have
> patience to follow the tutorial at first, but when I did I ended up
> ditching cua-mode and a lot of half-baked stuff I had.  I also
> didn't read the manual very often, because I didn't find it easily.
> I didn't even distinguish correctly between Emacs and Emacs Lisp
> manuals, and was confused by Info vs Man.  But C-h f and C-h k
> and following those hyperlinks were life savers from the start.
> Didn't care about the remaining C-h stuff though, which would have
> helped, in retrospect.

I started using Emacs in 1999, in fact I went to find GNU operating
system as I knew it is "type of Unix" that is what I knew, and I
wanted good multi-tasking, as I was pissed off with Windows lack of
performance in database population for search engine creation.

Instead of buying GNU on CD, that was available in Stuttgart's library
Witwer at that time, I have purchased some copy of "Red Hat Linux",
because I found they have "GNU" inside.

Among many software I tried, there was Emacs, that is where I could
read about the GNU project, and understand it.

I was using various Emacs versions, at that time there was XEmacs I
think and Emacs, I did not know what is what, I used both of them, all
Emacs were installed and I remember I had pleasure in learning, no
hard time, and there was a lot of jokes and stuff to read in the
directory of Emacs, I guess those are still there, like those in
share/emacs/28.0.50/etc -- and I remember I have not used any special
customizations, until I found gnus for news and email, those were only
customizations so far I used since 1999, until about some time
2016. Today I don't use customizations on many remote machines and in
various user accounts, why should I, I am using it mainly for editing.

I have used vi and vim, and from time to time I forget its key
bindings, while those from Emacs stay in my fingers.

Last person reading tutorial was Ugandan before few days, without
previous knowledge of computers, she could easily remember the key
bindings she learned, how to move the cursor, save file and similar, I
can just say that tutorial is helpful.

Jean