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Comment by numlocked | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice intro guide to emacs, but I think it goes without saying that if your CEO decides to learn emacs from scratch, you are in big trouble.

I say this as a dedicated, daily user of emacs and co-founder of a startup. Realistically it takes a year to get the hang of emacs to the point where you are more efficient in it than in other editors. The last thing I want my CEO (and friend and cofounder) doing is battling a weird Drop symlink issue with his .emacs file.

But I do agree that org-mode is amazing :)

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I don't think it takes that much to be more efficient than in other editors; avy/ace-jump alone already exceeds what I was using before. After mastering basic navigation and learning several other choice plugins such as undo-tree, expand-region, smartparens, evil/spacemacs if you secretly want to learn vim, I could see emacs already being more efficient.

The weird issues and workarounds are annoying, though.

I don't think it goes at all without saying?! Are all CEOs obliged to use MS Office, arguably inferior editing experience to pure text editing, or be doomed to yakshaving their dotfiles?

Emacs out of the box works.

Unfortunately there is a misconception that you need a 10kloc init.el to be productive. Worse still are the opinionated configurations targeted at newbs.

Emacs out of the box requires you to learn new key chords.

emacs out of the box most definitely does not work well. You could say that vim works out of box -- most vi people don't end up customizing their editors up the wazoo like emacs people do at least.

(By the way I say this is as an emacsian)

You should file a bug report.

If you're an emacsian, I'm not surprised that you think emacs needs customization for your use. As an emacsian, years ago I decided to stop customizing it, and guess what? Works great for me. So, as you can see, opinions about this differ.

OP here. It took me about three weeks to get back up to a high level of productivity in Emacs. At the time, I was learning a new keyboard (truly ergonomic) which was the greater challenge. My wrist tendons are thankful to me for those weeks of awkwardness. I think Emacs is wrong for the vast majority of CEOs, but for some (at least one) it's pretty great.

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