Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by microcolonel | Hacker News Reader

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> Exactly what I mean. It is insane. I can't get it straight. I really tried years ago. But it is plain and simple stupid.

No, you're just being ignorant, and not reading when people try to answer your questions.

> Abbreviation is only useful when writing for speed. When writing for reading, don't use them.

It's not an abbreviation, it's a different symbol. C is not Ctrl.

The software has some “baggage”, being the heir to a 40+ year legacy, but the problems you're ragging on are so shallow that it just tells me you never tried. Why would anyone want to continue holding the hand of somebody who isn't even trying?

Emacs is full of excellent documentation, the first thing it tells you when you open it is how to find the documentation, and if you have a mouse you can just click it; if you opened it and decided not to read the intro, but somehow a lot of other people are using it productively, maybe the main problem lies with you.

If you're looking for a piece of software that'll give you some sort of religious aesthetic orgasm just looking at it; sure, you'll be let down. If you were trying to get something done and approaching it honestly, these would not be your complaints about Emacs; trust me that there's a lot wrong with it. Having its own slightly different keybinding notation is like... number five thousand on the long list of actual issues with any honest attempt to be productive with Emacs.

And yet I could get a few things done in vim in a few minutes, and much more than that in a few weeks. And I choose not to use vim. And yet you said vim has insane key mapping but more people somehow use vim than emacs. Some things are not adding up. Emacs has excellent documentation but somehow very few people are able to use it. Some things are not adding up.

Emacs interface and community mannerisms _are_ user-hostile. As demonstrated by history.

Hey, chill.

There are lots of things that seem daunting at first and unforgiving to the impatient beginner: chess, surfing, martial arts, drawing... it doesn't mean that any of those are user-hostile, it just means that those that want to learn and master it will need to develop a certain discipline.

If you don't want that, fine. But what is the point of going around and saying that those who do enjoy these things are stupid?

I did not say they are stupid. I'm saying some communities build on pseudo-elitism. It's not stupid to enjoy using a text editor. It's stupid to argue that because it's hard to use (and hard to master) "you're just not getting it".

I think the expirement is over and conclusions can be drawn : emacs represent a tiny proportion of text editor's users, not because of a lack of features (is there's one thing missing it won't be for long), but because of what it is and the people and community around it.

> It's stupid to argue that because it's hard to use (and hard to master) "you're just not getting it".

It is also a bad misrepresentation of the point made by the person that you originally quoted.

Let me try an analogy: emacs is Olympic-sized pool, 50m long, 5m deep, with a 10m jump platform. It has been in use for decades by all kinds of people. Some new people see some amazing swimmers and divers using that pool and want to join. Problem is, they also don't know how to dive and are still learning to swim so they ask for a nice ladder on the corner and they want the pool to have one end shallow enough for people to stand on.

The developer is basically saying: yeah, getting in there is intimidating at first and we can do some improvements to help beginners, but we also need to find a way to get those beginners to get into the training program, train harder and dedicate themselves to diving, otherwise it would just be a waste of time and resources. Oh, and we also need to keep in mind that none of these changes should affect the people that are already training here for years.

> I'm saying some communities build on pseudo-elitism.

I'm not saying that Emacs users are better than you, I'm saying that you lack the experience to judge the value of Emacs; and that your lack of experience makes your assessments of Emacs basically too shallow to contribute meaningfully: in short, you don't know enough about Emacs to tell if your dismissal of it was premature, or if the things that turned you off were just the unfamiliar tail end of a coherent system.

It should be obvious that there are many many people who have spent more time actually using Emacs than you, and almost none of them by force or by fiat: literally nobody asked me to use Emacs, nobody started me using it, I received little or no assistance in learning it, I was mocked for using it as a teenager, and I spent most of my time with Emacs on teams of droves of people who do not use Emacs and evangelize other editors. At the outset, I simply wanted to try it, and I gave it a fair shake; I continued to use it because paid off for me.

The fact that people willingly start, and continue, using Emacs of their own volition with no external help or encouragement, should tell you that there are merits to the program that outweigh the things that turned you off before you gained any meaningful understanding.

I do not see emacs interface user-hostile. The UI even has a menu and a toolbar for discoverability.

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