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Comment by sspiff | Hacker News Reader

While emacs is a terrific editor (or platform for editors), it is not easy to use. It has a unique set of keyboard shortcuts, which means that for most newcomers, their familiar hotkeys or key combos will do things that they don't expect.

A modern, straightforward CLI editor would help many people.

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Actually its default keys are available in lots of other places. Most notably anything that uses readline (like bash), but I've even found the keys work in unexpected places like the MATLAB editor. Plus the letter keys and arrow keys already do what you expect. What "expected behaviour" are you referring to?

Granted, but bash and other readline applications generally have a very different mode of operation compared to a text editor. They operate on single lines of input at a time (most of the time). Editors like emacs operate on a multi-line body of text, and most people expect those to work like the other text fields in their environment (Ctrl-C/X/V for copy/cut/past, Ctrl-A for select all, shift-home/end/arrows to select text etc.)

I know you can activate those keybinding in Emacs, but then none of the documentation you find about keyboard shortcuts will apply to you.

The fact that many places support emacs keybindings (like MATLAB or IntelliJ) are an indication of how many programmers are used to those keybindings, but beginning or aspiring users most certainly are not.

Don't get me wrong. I love Emacs. I use Emacs everywhere, and for everything. But I know that the default behaviour and keybindings were a hurdle to overcome when I first got to know Emacs, and it took me time and effort to get comfortable within the editor.

Cocoa widgets for text entry in macOS support Emacs keybindings by default. Yes, TextEdit too. You cannot get nearer to beginning users than that.

But yes, it takes a time to get used to. But that's matter of familiarity.

But only Emacs users use those keybindings with those widgets, so that's not a good argument to say "emacs keybindings are well known by novice users".

Emacs cua-mode is not bad. It does create some confusion with C-x shortcuts, eg. C-x C-s when typed too slowly will cut selected text and enter search, instead of saving :-( But I'd love a more total conversion to CUA... E.g. I have C-o to open files, and C-w to close buffer/window.

https://gist.github.com/cben/ada7675ab9aa14000a1a50eae398611...

-- emacs user for >15yr, tired of motor context switching. (Terminal Ctrl+Shift+X/C/V vs it opening devtools in Chrome is bad enough...)

On my computers anything that uses readline behaves like vi.

Emacs has a GUI with icons and menus and tooltips and all that.

Isn't that what a true beginner would use anyway instead of the terminal version?

We're talking terminal (not GUI) editors here. If I fire emacs on macOS there's no menu displayed by default. If I connect remotely on a Debian machine, the menu is there but mouse reporting is not working. The help, if started by itself, vanishes at the first keypress (on macOS), which makes it really easy to skip the C-x C-c part, and uses the emacs-only convention of C- instead of the well known ^ for control (although it's explained right there), thus doubly easy to miss. I can see how newcomers would be turned away from it.

vi(m) is usually included by default and is no easier to use for a beginner, so why not emacs?

`apt-get install emacs-nox` pulls in 83MB on jessie. The installed-by-default one is vim-tiny (clocking in at 27MB), not vim-nox (which pulls in an additional 21MB), for which there is no similar emacs package. Turns out nano is ~370kB, that makes for a small non-modal beginner editor, the modal one being covered by vim-tiny.

Fair, but I don't think 20MB vs 80MB should be a problem in 2017, people are downloading ~60GB games off Steam, downloading a ~5GB ISO every 6-24 months is not that much in comparison.

For some people on the move data transfers are expensive, even if 80MB isn't much that adds up very fast.

Because modal editing is where it's at!

>Emacs has a GUI with icons and menus and tooltips and all that.

Which is still nearly useless without knowing of lots of Emacs arcana.

I was once a "true beginner", having been forced to use basic terminal commands in school and having decided to get a raspberry pi and shove Raspbian on it for laughs. There is no GUI over ssh from Windows unless you already know what you're doing. In that context, accidentally opening emacs is bewildering :)

That's basically my question. What's the market for people who want a terminal based programmers editor in late 2017 who don't already use Vim or Emacs?

I moved from Vim to Spacemacs (emacs with evil kit) four years ago. I was worried initially worried my productivity might go down due to not knowing emacs functions. Surprisingly, there was an included plugin (https://github.com/kai2nenobu/guide-key/blob/master/README.o...) that offered me all the possible keys at the bottom. Most functiond are two, three or four keys away. For instance, I wanted to copy the file name I am editing I could press Spacebar, which offered about 15 further keys, such as f all functions to do with files, b for buffer functions, w for window functions, etc. Once i pressed f, then I see all the functions possible on a file, including Spc-f-y for yanking the file name. This made the editor auto discoverable for me, almost like jumping to Windows 3 after years on MS-DOS.

Spacemacs is amazing but it's almost an IDE at that point.

An IDE with the best embedded editor, Vim, reimplemented with elisp!

> While emacs is a terrific editor ... it is not easy to use.

I would suggest it is easy to use, mainly because it can be customised pretty heavily to work your way, it just isn't easy to learn which is why I've stuck with other options.

I think that "easy to use" means "easy to use from the beginning" most of the time.

Emacs is mostly just unfamiliar. It's also a little bit opinionated, and out of the box its opinions have a little bit of distance from most GUI editors.

It's not actually hard to learn. I reckon vi is harder to learn, but at least with vi you know you have to do things differently. Emacs is much closer to other common editors, just a little bit different, and that can make it surprisingly frustrating, with the emphasis on surprise.

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