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Comment by cpach | Hacker News Reader

When I set out to learn Emacs in the year ~2001 or so, I just did C-h t in order to launch the builtin tutorial. IMHO that can still be a viable way to get started.

Spacemacs might be nice but it’s in no way required in order to be productive with Emacs. My personal .emacs file is only 32 lines long (28 lines of comments are not counted).

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If you need a dedicated tutorial for a text editor it's a great sign that something is very wrong with its design, particularly concerning discoverability.

Emacs has no user-friendly command names (you need to memorize function names which are often meaningless abbreviations), no autocomplete, and doesn't show available functions.

Maybe helm (https://emacs-helm.github.io/helm/) should be installed and preconfigured by default.

This solves a lot of the shortcomings of vanilla emacs.

Helm is a little heavy-weight. Ivy is lighter, but also does a lot of NIH stuff it doesn't need to. I personally like selectrum, (https://github.com/raxod502/selectrum) because it provides the features of Ivy and quite a bit of extensibility, while still only using the built-in extension points in emacs (completing-read-function, etc.). I do wish the emacs developers would bless something and include and configure it by default, though.

There's a new builtin icomplete-vertical mode in Emacs 28, but I assume that like so many defaults, switching is deemed socially infeasible, so we are stuck turning it on ourselves.

> Emacs has [...] no autocomplete, and doesn't show available functions

My impression is that you are not familiar with Emacs.

I have been using emacs for 7 years prior to switching to VS Code. Never looked back. It's better in all regards.

Sorry for misunderstanding. I see now that you meant autocompletion like LSP (rather than M-x minibuffer completion). Emacs could benefit from built-in LSP, I agree.

Emacs-devel are keen for it, and eglot.el is a good contender for inclusion.

Could name a single specific feature that somebody who uses emacs for years is missing? (perhaps, a link to a video if it is hard to describe concisely would be useful)

I've tried recently to steal some features from VS Code but nothing fundamental came up. I've discovered the gitlens' git-blame overlay feature but it is cosmetics (I use magit-blame). btw, the feature is available as blamer emacs package (just add the corresponding (use-package) elegant declaration to your .emacs).

I use tramp to run remote commands using Org-babel all of the time. Obviously, emacs can edit remote files just fine too. What am I missing?

> I have been using emacs for 7 years prior to switching to VS Code.

Based on what you've been claiming I doubt that.

You used emacs for 7 years without learning that it very much has auto-completion, you can see available functions with fuzzy matching, and that you can easily alias any function to any name or key-binding you want instead of memorizing it?

:-O

Emacs was founded in the 1970s. There is a lot of legacy in there, but IMHO it still holds up as a very powerful and nice text editor.

“If you need a dedicated tutorial for a text editor it's a great sign that something is very wrong with its design, particularly concerning discoverability.”

I don’t agree. If it was a mass-market product for users who just wants something convenient, then I would agree. Those users are probably better served by other applications. (Word, Evernote, OneNote, Notepad++ etc etc) But Emacs is a power tool for power user. Therefore I think it’s okay that it needs a tutorial to get started. You need to invest some time to learn in. That will, in my experience, pay off greatly in the long run.

Let’s take an example from another domain:

Suppose someone wants to get started with 3D Graphics. I’m pretty sure software like Blender and Maya also needs some kind of tutorial in order to be useful.

There already exists better power tools for power users, that are easy to use and easy to customize, yet still more powerful than Emacs. It's a common misconception that if it's arbitrarily hard to understand, it must be something for power users. Bad design is not a feature.

You need dedicated tutorials, or equivalents, for all complicated tools and machinery. The power of Emacs (with respect to text editing capabilities) comes from mastering, by committing to muscle memory, a large number of key sequences. There's no easy way to do this- it takes time and effort (100% worth the payoff imo).

That's some kind of protestant work ethic. It doesn't need to require days of busywork to be powerful. VS Code is more powerful, easier to configure, and more productive out of the box. The default feature VS Code offers make hundreds of lines of Emacs configs with dozens of custom plugins look laughable. Tramp mode is pure trash compared to remote editing in vs code. Stuff like syntax highlighting, intellisense, git integration, and other useful features are years ahead of Emacs too. Every language, including C, is supported better.

Yes, it takes work, it's like learning how to dance, draw, or paint. My emacs config is literally 64183 lines of elisp + 2356 snippets (just checked), so I'm not really considering a major editor switch at this point.

I've used VS code as well, it's fine for what it does and certainly much more beginner friendly.

Imagine what you could have accomplished if you didn't have to spend all that time writing an entire large codebase just to make it usable. It's a false assumption that it should require pointless busywork to be useful. You're never getting back the time you've wasted on writing a config for an obsolete editor.

I love writing elisp, obviously! It wasn't some drudgery for me, it was the whole reason I even got into coding (from using R in emacs) in the first place.

I got into a habit (obsession?) of automating as much as possible everything I repetitively do on a computer by writing elisp. It's essentially my operating system.

ESS is truly a gateway drug.

> Imagine what you could have accomplished if you didn't have to spend all that time writing an entire large codebase just to make it usable. It's a false assumption that it should require pointless busywork to be useful. You're never getting back the time you've wasted on writing a config for an obsolete editor.

Isn't this precisely the kind of "protestant work ethic" that you mentioned just before? If someone enjoys writing ELisp for Emacs, what's wrong with writing 61k lines of it?

I'm keen to hear more about VS Code's remote editing strengths over TRAMP.

What is it in particular?

I see some UI operations block on TRAMP operations which is laggy and annoying.

Vim has a built-in tutorial too. As said elsewhere, you literally cannot get started in Vim without knowing a dozen command and grokking modes, in Emacs you can at least stumble around without knowing anything.

Equally, there's a difference in target audience. Do you need a tutorial to operate a screwdriver? No. Power drill? Arguably yes. CNC mill? Dear God please yes. I don't think you expect a fork lift or nail gun to be accessible with zero runway by anyone, or for their features to be discoverable by trial-and-error.

You could argue that this is not a worthwhile niche, and maybe that's right (at least for you and like-minded people) but it's just what it is.

> As said elsewhere, you literally cannot get started in Vim without knowing a dozen command and grokking modes

You need i, escape, :w! and !wq. hjkl too if you're feeling fancy. But i, escape, :w! and !wq is all you need to use Vim. I know because I used it like that for two years in college.

Ctrl-z followed by killall -9 vim is how I usually exited vim.

I once pissed off dozens of customers by symlinking vim to emacs on one of our shell servers (back when isps gave you login access to a Linux/Unix box...

(Yes, it wasn't very nice, but it was funny)

This is kind of an odd attitude. I haven't used VS Code, but I have used PyCharm extensively before. There's a) so many buttons everywhere, with hovertext that doesn't help unless you already know what you're doing, and b) so many things buried in random configuration screens.

I recently started using Doom Emacs and really like it. There's a learning curve, but in contrast to what you're asserting, every other IDE has at least a similar learning curve. Unless by "text editor" you mean no IDEs, but then VS Code is out too, and I'm not sure what we're talking about.

"No autocomplete" and "doesn't show available functions" are a matter of bad defaults, rather than lack of capability. There are great packages for them available, but even in core, there are OK options (ido-mode). I do wish that the core team would "bless" great packages and work towards bringing them into core and into the defaults.

FSF copyright assignment is a stumbling block here in my opinion.

Emacs has user friendly command names, functions in Emacs have a full command name. Can you guess what "comment-region" does? That's right it comments out the currently selected region. Or "switch-to-buffer"? That's right, it's used to switch buffers. Obviously if you use these things regularly typing all that gets tedious so you can use keyboard shortcuts like C-x-b to switch buffers instead. Sometimes these have relation to the command they call but sometimes they don't, but neither does something like Ctrl-Z (What does Z have to do with undo?).

Emacs doesn't have autocomplete built in but it does have tab completion and if you press tab it will show you possible functions that start with what you typed if there is more than 1 option available.

I think most of the trouble people have with Emacs is that it doesn't use standard terminology or conventions mainly do to its age. There is nothing more discoverable about Ctrl-Z vs. Ctrl-/ other than that Ctrl-Z became the defacto standard. If you took two novice computer users that have never used a computer in their life I think they would have just as much trouble with VS code as Emacs.

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