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Comment by chewxy | Hacker News Reader

emacs' discoverability has been quite terrible. A couple years back I wrote half of a package to do ascii art before I discovered artist-mode. And I had been using emacs for close to a decade by then. This year I discovered ace-window had hidden keybindings (C-x o then instead of choosing the window you want, type '?' to get the dispatch menu). Again, I've been using ace-window for about a decade. Adding a transient dispatch menu to Isearch would be great. I'd also suggest a more global keybinding for hidden dispatch menu (I suggest M-? for dispatch menus when using the minibuffer and ? for other modes).

Also this blog post makes me want to make me transform my embark to using transient

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C-h a (apropos-command) makes finding things with unexpected names a lot easier. I relied on C-h f (describe-function) for years, but that only matches function names. Apropos searches doc strings as well.

Yeah I probably use 5% (or less) of emacs's functionality. It's still the best editor I've ever found.

it's the curse of large programs, regularly you'll read "I've been using emacs for N decades and I had no ideas this existed ..."

I somehow RTFM'd three times, allegedly diligently and yet I still missed a lot of spots. And emacs development pace increased, so I'm due to a 4th RTFM :)

An alternative process is to call describe-function, use embark-collect to put all the auto suggestions into a buffer and memorise all functions.

Edit: I just did that and when I called count words to count lines that are in the buffer, Emacs just froze

Edit: 39180 functions. Not that hard to memorise ;P

even emacs can't handle itself

It’s getting better though. The addition of shortdoc, the `marginalia` package (which makes some already present doc text available during minibuffer usage), and the `helpful` package (which again just places already available information in the help buffer) make things so much better. I’ve been using VS Code lately, because the tooling for something at work is so much better, but the lack of introspection and hackability is really frustrating.

But discoverability can be done right in emacs. I think one of the better examples is magit (from which transient comes from).

The which-key package helps a lot with discoverability, in my experience.

which-key helps a lot with prefix commands. But doesn't help when you don't know the variants of I search that have silly default key bindings like the aforementioned C-M-@

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