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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

I thought “lol 19 lessons for keyboard shortcuts???” - but then I thought about what an Emacs equivalent would look like. To even bind a new shortcut you need to write Lisp!

I love it but you can cut yourself pretty badly on the learning curve.

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To be fair, you don't need to do all 19 lessons. They are grouped by importance and topic. If you just do the first 2 modules you will already feel quite comfortable with VSCode and I think those can be completed in less than an hour with very little prior experience.

Actually, in Emacs, you only need to know one shortcut, C-H t, which runs the Emacs tutorial. Takes ~45 minutes, and gives you enough knowledge to be productive. I say that not because I'm pushing Emacs: I'm pretty sure similar tutorials exist for the Vim family.

On the other hand, I can't imagine doing 19 lessons on VSCode shortcuts. Actually, I can, I just am sure I wouldn't remember much afterwards.

Funny story: when I was starting on Linux, I have both the vim and Emacs tutorials a go. The vim one is just a text file you edit with various commands given.

During that tutorial I pressed the wrong thing and somehow deleted the whole file. I then thought, vim is not for me :)

I stuck with Emacs, though I recently discovered the joys of vim too.

To be productive in VSCode, you don't need to know any shortcuts or do any tutorials because it can be used completely via the gui. Doing 19 lessons on VSCode shortcuts is akin to doing an Emacs course, not a tutorial.

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