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I recently setup Emacs on a Windows work computer and the install process is definitely needlessly difficult. Other "popular" editors have a big download link on the homepage while Emacs you have to scroll through the lecture on non-free systems, and then link to an ftp server where you have to try to figure out which file you need to download.

From the Emacs install instructions:

"Nonfree systems

The reason for GNU Emacs's existence is to provide a powerful editor for the GNU operating system. Versions of GNU, such as GNU/Linux, are the primary platforms for Emacs development.

However, GNU Emacs includes support for some other systems that volunteers choose to support.

The purpose of the GNU system is to give users the freedom that proprietary software takes away from its users. Proprietary operating systems (like other proprietary programs) are an injustice, and we aim for a world in which they do not exist.

To improve the use of proprietary systems is a misguided goal. Our aim, rather, is to eliminate them. We include support for some proprietary systems in GNU Emacs in the hope that running Emacs on them will give users a taste of freedom and thus lead them to free themselves.

Windows

GNU Emacs for Windows can be downloaded from a nearby GNU mirror; or the main GNU FTP server. Unzip the zip file preserving the directory structure, and run bin\runemacs.exe. Alternatively, create a desktop shortcut to bin\runemacs.exe, and start Emacs by double-clicking on that shortcut's icon."

> it teaches me is some odd-for-me commands to navigate that as a user are all new and unlike every editor I've used.

That is the point. If it worked the same as every editor you've used, why switch? The point why Emacs is better is because it's different. These things need to be learned. Otherwise, Emacs can't help you.

It would be like people complaining that playing a guitar is different than pushing the play button on every music player they've ever tried. Well, yes, that is the point.

Really? The point why Emacs is better is that it has different keyboard shortcuts?

That is what I never understood -- I've implemented exactly this "which editor emulation do you want to use" and "edit your own bindings" for one Windows product containing editor in early nineties. It wasn't hard. The default was, of course, the "least surprising" for the platform, but it also allowed other popular editors then. If there's anything that can reduce friction to the new user, it's that: a beginner can use the actions he already knows how to do. Let him just the ability to access those that are unique -- for these he anyway doesn't have any reflexes.

My biggest eyeroll whenever I looked at Emacs "help" (or any other, Emacs is not unique in that approach) was "and then you use Meta key." Well I don't think that anybody bought a physical keyboard with a key on which it was written "Meta" for a least 30 years. How about recognizing that for the beginners?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_key

"But, meta is not always the same key" I hear every time -- fine, but that should also be the part of "advanced stuff." Just let people know that they initially have Alt, Ctrl and Escape where on the keycaps Alt, Ctrl and Escape are written.

In Emacs, you can configure literally anything, including the keybindings. Some people use Emacs with Vim keybindings (Evil, Spacemacs, Doom).

Now, for me, typical Emacs keybindings, of which the majority is defined in 3rd party packages are very logical, while Vim's are not. But the users who prefer the Vim way did they work and configured Emacs however they liked.

OTOH, of the million people who complain and ask for Ctrl+C for copy and Ctrl+V for paste and whatnot, I've never seen anyone who did the 2 minutes or two hours of work, went into a configuration, and changed these keys. Why's that so, if that's such a great idea?

Probably because having the default be something other than what a user is used to is not going to compel them towards doing the research to fix it.

In order to get cua-mode working in emacs, you first have to know that it exists. I didn't know it existed for like two years of daily emacs usage, I just can't find it in myself to expect someone to know about it after 10 minutes.

By the time you know it exists, you've already accepted the keybindings and you've already put in the time to build some muscle memory, and it doesn't seem as important anymore.

The fact that some people get past it isn't really an indicator that it isn't a huge friction point.

Perhaps, but out of the million and counting know-alls, who:

1) claim they know a thing or two about emacs

2) claim that the biggest problem emacs has is CUV

3) demand that change from the core Emacs team

exactly zero people created a CUV-emacs configuration, and gifted it to the world.

I think that's telling.

Keep in mind that all three combinations are central to Emacs

1) C-c is used in million combinations 2) C-u too 3) C-v scrolls a page down.

This is _very_ surprising. CUA mode is called out as the fifth item in the options menu, and the menu description itself describes what it offers.

"Use CUA Keys (Cut/Paste with C-x/C-c/C-v)"

It doesn't require any knowledge of lisp at all (contrary to the assertion in the LWN article), and you don't have to know it exists, at least not any more than any other option in a menu requires that.

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V are only two bindings, it's hardly a big deal. But I've used Emacs for decades, and I expect a lot of control-key bindings, to the point that remapping the CapsLock key as an extra control is a vital part of making a computer usable.

Do other editors have the CapsLock binding problem, or do they generally rely on something other than control keys?

> I've never seen anyone who did the 2 minutes or two hours of work, went into a configuration, and changed these keys.

I believe it's true: I don't think anybody could even dare trying to change the key combinations if all the help pages can help you only with the description "META v" means "scrolling down in x jumps" or whatever.

In that case one spends time figuring out that these weird pages write each time "META" instead of writing... I don't know what... and then one just "translates" in head each time, cursing the "help" for not being direct. But changing the combinations to make even such "help" even more unusable? No way.

The complete mindset would have to be different across all tutorial and references to avoid "hardcoding" the key combinations even there -- the "proper" help would reflect the environment as chosen.

The beginner's expectation is that all trivial interactions could be done the way he's already used to perform them, and the "power" of the editor is not in pressing combination a or combination b, but in the functionality which is not present in other editors.

For the context: One of my oldest muscle memories are key combinations of Wordstar, a character-based text processor. The the editors on DOS and later Window which targeted programmers had for years default key combinations which imitated Wordstar, or allowed to select them once for all. But most people from that times unlearned these combinations once they started using Windows GUI, expecting that all GUI interactions use the GUI common key combinations, like holding shift and moving cursor using the arrow keys to mark the selection. Some convention came from the traditional Mac OS, initially Windows started with some other combinations than Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, but I've never used these older Windows-unique (Shift-Insert or something). Of course on Linux GUIs it can still be a mess:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/26655/how-do-you-know-when-t...

where sometimes one work and another not when clipboards aren't "shared" with installing some additional program that does that. So let's not go there. Considering the more "stable" GUI platforms (which sometimes also, unfortunately, aren't: some special "clipboard managers" are introduced there too in different occasions) the editors should "fit" to them as much as possible.

Is there is any tutorial "start using Emacs based on what you already know when using Notepad, without having to unlearn the basic operations with the keyboard"?

At the end a "normal" user just wants to do his job. If some tool allow doing what other tools don't, that's the reason for the tool.

Editors, once they become "the environment" for work are however also not normal tools. If the whole production in some company is based on some set of tools, one will accept them "just to get the job done" since anything else would mean even more unnecessary effort. That's how some people learn vi, for example, reading the HN posts. They join a team where it's "how the job is done".

How many typical Notepad users use ANY shortcuts as the basic keyboard operations? I'd say a tiny minority. A typical Notepad user that I've seen uses the mouse exclusively, and clicks around menu. Yes, that includes copy, paste, and save, the three operations that you'd think everyone would perform on keyboard. But, say, 50% of the users don't even do that. For 40% these three shortcuts are pretty much everything they do on the keyboard. The rest is the mouse. Perhaps, 10% are the users who only ever open Notepad, and try to use muscle memory from a more powerful editor.

Is that bad? No! From the perspective of unlearning, it's ideal! The problem that Emacs has is not so much that tyical Notepad users have to unlearn a ton of stuff, it's that they are not so eager to learn anything keyboard-oriented.

No amount of crippling Emacs would help there. It can only spoil it for existing happy users. As people mentioned in this thread, there are things that are aging (large files, freezes, whatnot) but the keybindings is something Emacsers actually like.

> No amount of crippling Emacs would help there. It can only spoil it for existing happy users.

I am surely against "crippling."

The initial topic of the discussion was how to make Emacs accessible to the new users. I don't suggest making fixed changes to anything, only allowing somebody to easily select different defaults which correspond with the keyboards available today. Today's keyboard has no meta key. Old keyboards didn't have a lot of keys that today's exist and have expected behavior in GUI -- potential Emacs user should have a possibility to turn on "consistent" behavior for everything that can be consistent, and the help should be easy to read without having to divine what META key in the "easy" case could even mean.

Of course the old users should be able to use old behavior.

But that is certainly not only possible, but available today in Emacs. It's here. Use it and evangelize it if you like.

What I talk about is what "amadeuspagel" also describes in a post here.

And to confirm that experience, until participating in this conversation, I also didn't know that it could be possible to efficiently use Emacs with the key combinations of some "more familiar to common people" editor.

And I'm still confused: if you say "Keep in mind that all three combinations are central to Emacs 1) C-c is used in million combinations 2) C-u too 3) C-v scrolls a page down."

What then? Does it mean that I can't use the "million combinations" if I want Ctrl-C to mean copy? What is then the start of "a million combinations"? Why should't help system simply adjust to display the "start of million of combinations" as the thing I selected at the start? If I like Ctrl K instead, couldn't that be "the start of the million of combinations"?

And why should I care that "C-v scrolls a page down"? The keyboards since at least 1987 have a physical "Page Down" key, why should I not use that then?

(And they surely don't have a physical "Meta" key).

I hope that's a usable example of what confuses at least one kind of a beginner.

If you open VS Code for the first time, it asks you immidiately what keyboard shortcuts you want to use. When you open Emacs, you see a tutorial that tries to teach other keyboard shortcuts, and not a hint that you can change them, let alone how.

For me the killer feature of using emacs on a Mac is having a dedicated command c/v/x/z for copy/paste/cut/undo that's separate from ctrl c/v/x/z in emacs (and readline shell bindings in general).

Nope, it's the ecosystem around them.

Emacs has a lot of selling points, but the keybindings aren't one of them.

I spent weeks trying to switch, but ultimately I found the experience frustrating. UIs follow the same patterns for a reason, it makes it easier for users to adopt the tech.

The biggest draw for me was org-mode with org-babel. I've never seen anything else like it

> Emacs has a lot of selling points, but the keybindings aren't one of them.

I find this difficult to understand for people who use the terminal. The keybindings are the exact same for most terminals by default, since they use readline. Want to go to the end of your command? `Ctrl-E`. Want to go to the beginning? `Ctrl-A`. Want to search backwards through history? `Ctrl-R` (same thing you would do while searching backwards through an Emacs buffer).

All of these also happen to work everywhere in MacOS. Put your cursor on the URL and press Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E.

Personally, out of those I've only used Ctrl-R in the terminal. I just use the Home/End keys to navigate to the start/end of lines. I was actually surprised to read that Ctrl-E and Ctrl-A would do that. I usually expect Ctrl-A to select all, and don't really expect anything from Ctrl-E. (Though, I'd be surprised if home/end didn't work in Emacs, I'm just saying I've never used those readline keybinds).

Home/End should go to the start/end of the file, not the line.

Oh you’re a Windows or Linux user? Too bad, now you need to get used to modern key bindings like OS X has.

It is not bad. Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End.

Get out of the apple cult.

I don't use OS X. I do use Emacs. I don't use CUA. HN has trouble with metaphor.

> I just use the Home/End keys to navigate to the start/end of lines.

If true, my guess is these were added to the shells recently (e.g. last 15 years). When I started using Linux (in the 2000's), these keybindings didn't work. It was Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E. I'd love to do a survey to see how many shell users use these vs Home/End.

I'm pretty sure the number of shell users has grown exponentially in recent years. I wouldn't be surprised if most users wouldn't know them.

However, the more one uses the shell, knowing those emacs shortcuts really helps (not just Ctrl+A, but also going forward or back one word). Especially on a show connection.

The saddest thing is its easier to just install it from WSL and use something an X server and it runs faster.

But Windows IS evil...

Please don't post flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. We're trying for something different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html