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Comment by olau | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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