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The thing about Emacs is that it has nailed the text editing aspect really, really well.

Emacs actually has a built-in tutorial. It takes an hour or two to go through, if I remember correctly. Most people don't do it, I think, because they think they know how to edit text - you just use the cursor keys and hit the keys you want to insert?

But if you follow the advice in the tutorial and practice over a day or two at a reduced speed, it does actually make a noticeable difference, IMHO.

It's a bit like touch typing. I know plenty of programmers who can't touch type. Yet, in my experience it actually frees a noticeable amount of brain power. But it does take maybe 10-20 hours to learn. So people don't do it.

An hour or two for a tutorial is just too much.

What VSCode offers on this front that strikes me as a really killer feature is the command palette. It's a great UI - whenever you want to do something, and you're not sure what to do, just hit the hotkey to open the command palette (on Macs it's shift-splat-P) and start typing the name of what you want to do. It'll give you a menu of actions, and, if a hotkey is assigned, show it to you.

It means you never need to leave the keyboard to hunt through menus to find something, and you also don't need to read through endless lists of hotkeys and create Anki flashcards for them just to get yourself pushed over the "I can't get any work done here" phase of the learning curve.

I know many users tout using anki flashcards for memorizing hotkeys, but I think this is the wrong way of going about it. There's a term called "Fringe Tech" https://www.oxbridgenotes.com/articles/janki_method_refined , it states don't make a card with questionable uses down the road. Your hotkey is going to be irrelevant if you change the bindings to something more optimal. You learn this fairly quickly if you play competitive video games like fortnite or rocket league.

Anki should be used for memorizing concepts you understand already not button pressing.

Instead, my new macbookPro (and my first time using macOS), I have dozens of printed out cheatsheet snippets and stickynotes littering the edges of the keyboard. I write down a bunch of hotkeys I can refer to instantly by glancing down at my keyboard. Conceptually, its the same way I did things with cheatsheets in college before an exam - it just works. I made a legend for things like ⌘⇧⌥⌃⇪, these are very unfamiliar to me as a windows user.

It makes for a frictionless experience for memorizing commands.

> What VSCode offers on this front that strikes me as a really killer feature is the command palette.

You can use `helm-M-x` from Helm[1] to do the same in Emacs.

[1]: https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm

Touch typing is always a good investment in time though. You'll always be typing something, regardless if its a google search, writing code, playing video games, etc.

I learned to touchtype from playing too much starcraft growing up. If you didn't touch type you were never going to be good, period.

Consequently, playing FPS so much growing up has given me extremely precise mouse movements. I rarely ever misclick things on accident, those quickscopes came in handy.

I second you and urge everyone to do the tutorial. The problem with Emacs is after you go past the basics. Company or automplete ? Is ido good or bad ? The single fact that the author (which claims to have spend 10 years in Emacs) has spent a day to configure a half baked javascript IDE (which works from the start in VSCode) is sufficient enough to say that Emacs lacks good documentation past the basics.

> I think people honestly get too invested in their tools. A tool is a tool, nothing more nothing less. If someones first thought about you is "oh he's that emacs guy!", thats not a good thing.

Gonna have to disagree here, there are good tools and bad tools. This mindset of a tool is a tool is why my company still uses cmsynergy and why nobody writes code is MS word.

Being thought of because you have proficiency in a tool is definitely not a bad thing, especially if it allows you to be more productive. Investment in a tool like emacs also typically isn't a bad thing because emacs can be found on just about any Linux PC in existence, same with vim.

Fair enough you make a good point. What I meant is your sole identity shouldn't be based on a tool or framework. At the same time being proficient at a tool does help out when that tool comes in handy.

> if you memorize all the hotkeys and commands. But to get to that point requires a lot of memorization and practice, something I don't have the luxury of. Time spent familiarizing myself with a nice GUI interface like VScode to get the same job done is easier.

A lot of people use keybindings all the time, even on vscode/atom(at the very least copy/paste). People using vim/emacs don't start by memorising all keybindings, they start with very basics and as they find more useful things, they start using them.

> I think people honestly get too invested in their tools.

Editor is the most important tool for a programmer, so yes you should invest in it(may it be vscode/vim/emacs).

I might be biased here, but I come from a long time windows OS background. I started recently using macOS as well. If I used linux as my primary OS, I probably would use VIM/emacs much more.

Editor is the most important tool, I agree with you. I still use VIM when working with servers, but that's about it.

I mostly do frontend development so I don't see a huge amount of value investing in emacs. My perspectives might change down the road, when I start working on backend infrastructure.

I still think emacs has too high of a learning curve for the value you get out of it. Installing emacs on windows is not entirely straightforward either, I have to go watch a video to even install it. I write my own scripts and macros on windows all the time though.

The reason why I prefer GUI interfaces is because I can only deal with so much cognitive overhead. I still initialize most things using a CLI (e.g. cloning a git repo). However I don't only do programming, I also do UX, graphics design, and 3D CAD modelling among other things.

Emacs should have enough value to warrant the amount of cognitive overhead it cost. It does if you only program though.

Ime, it reduces cognitive overhead. At this point, it's just intuitive how to do a given thing in vim, and doing it in another editor would take longer for no perceptible gain. I tried to use clion once for a project, I really tried, I used the ideavim plugin so my keybindings were right at home and it just felt clunky. The process of committing seemed so much more difficult and convoluted than just a quick git diff/git status followed by git commit. Changing files required me to use the mouse (I'm sure it's possible to do it with the keyboard, but not in such a configurable way). Building I had less control over so I had to think about what it was doing whereas I can at the drop of a hat switch between 'make', 'make debug', 'make opt', 'make clean; make' (if there are unfound artifacts). Using a new file-type doesn't require me to install a whole heavy plugin that integrates with the build system and completer, I just need a syntax highlighter (which more than likely is already there) and I'm golden.[

You're right, keyboard shortcuts only become useful when you spend most of your time in that tool. If the tool is only used occasionally, i too prefer GUIs, because they are easy to get started with.

I had my devOps friend whom I consider to be a hardcore VIM poweruser, walk me through her workflow

VIM on linux can do some absolutely amazing things with just a keyboard and a single monitor. More so than any other application I've seen. You don't need the touchpad at all. Swapping from insert mode, normal, visual, select etc.

VIM has much stronger capabilities when it comes to editing code / text. It takes very few keystrokes to do common types of text manipulation. With my macbook I always misclick things fairly frequently because I'm not used to a touchpad.

Emacs I don't know any hardcore powerusers, but from what I've seen its similar except its more reactive to inputs

Even though I don't intend on using Emacs or Vim to that level, I still think its worth learning. There's many ideas from these toolsets to implement into your own workflow.