Comment by iLemming | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iLemming | Hacker News Reader

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> if it actually had good documentation

Great trolling. Emacs has remarkably good documentation. You can look up the documentation of any function and command. You are not even allowed to ship an extension (package) for Emacs to any major package repository without properly linting and ensuring that every single publicly used function has a proper docstring, where each argument is documented, and each docstring is properly formatted and punctuation is in place.

> I give up every time because it is just too frustrating

It's quite alright. I gave up multiple times before finally moving over. The biggest revelation I had is that instead of trying to "understand the features" of the editor, I needed to start learning Emacs Lisp and how to properly write it. How standard hooks work, how to use --debug-init to analyze what's being loaded; how edebug and built-in profiler work, how to investigate exactly what happens when I press a key, etc. Just be patient, Emacs is a beast, nobody ever tamed it in one day. It takes time and patience.

> > if it actually had good documentation

> Great trolling.

I didn't mean to troll, but I definitely could've phrased it better.

I don't mean Emacs has bad documentation - in fact, as one of the oldest GNU packages around (and RMS' own pet project), it probably has the most comprehensive documentation around.

But, as other people have mentioned, it's too damn large. Eight chapters until I get to the basic editing commands! And that's just the default keybindings - which, according to most Emacs users, suck and need to be changed to your own taste with keyboard macros - which are waiting for you on the eighteenth chapter!

Maybe I'm a youngster spoiled by television and videogames and need to get off your lawn, but having to read eighteen chapters just to get to make my own keyboard mappings is... discouraging. In contrast, learning Vim took me an hour of Vimtutor, then slowly discovering feature by feature when I needed it. It was a much more natural process than all my attempts to learn Emacs.

> but having to read eighteen chapters just to get to make my own keyboard mappings is...

That's a very disingenuous way of deflecting your lack of motivation for learning Emacs on 18 chapters of documentation. I'm sure you code in some programming language, maybe multiple of them even. I'm sure each such programming language comes with tons of documentation. Do you read the whole language manuals/books before you start doing something useful with it? Or do you just learn the basics and look up what you need as you figure it out?

The basics of Emacs are easily accessible from C-h t and that's the first thing Emacs shows in its welcome screen when you launch it the first time. It takes less time to finish that C-h t tutorial than it takes to learn the basics of a new programming language.

Nobody really reads 18 chapters of documentation before making keyboard mappings. I make keyboard mappings and I read 0 chapters of the documentation. 0. Zero. How? Just like you do anything else in software these days? Looking it up, jumping directly to the documentation I needed to learn how to do key maps.

There's nothing special about doing things in Emacs. You can learn Emacs just the way you learn any programming language. What might be different about learning Rust or Python might be that most people find themselves motivated to learn it so they are motivated enough to look up what they need. But many people are not so motivated to learn what they perceive as merely an editor. If you do not have the motivation to learn Emacs the same way, that's fine. But blaming it on the large documentation does not seem fair.

> Nobody really reads 18 chapters of documentation before making keyboard mappings. I make keyboard mappings and I read 0 chapters of the documentation. 0. Zero. How? Just like you do anything else in software these days? Looking it up, jumping directly to the documentation I needed to learn how to do key maps.

Yes, and that's the approach I used multiple times, the same approach that helped me learn Vim. The learning curve is much steeper, and Vimtutor is much easier to comprehend than the C-t h tutorial.

That's what I tried to say in the first comment, and people attacked me by saying Emacs has awesome documentation. Now you're attacking me, saying that documentation doesn't matter and nobody reads it anyway...

> that documentation doesn't matter and nobody reads it anyway

Did I say that? I don't think so. I said that it is possible to create key mappings without reading 18 chapters of documentation. How? By looking up what we need.

But Emacs users do read the documentation but not necessarily in a linear manner where they must start from Chapter 1 and go all the way to Chapter 18 before they are able to do something. Some people might it read like that. But most people including myself read the parts that matter to us.

> Did I say that? I don't think so. I said that it is possible to create key mappings without reading 18 chapters of documentation. How? By looking up what we need.

And I said that approach didn't work for me. Great that it worked for you, but I found that looking stuff up for Vim was much easier than looking up stuff for Emacs. Which is what I basically said in the first comment and explained several times in this comment thread.

> In contrast, learning Vim took me an hour of Vimtutor, then slowly discovering feature by feature when I needed it.

My process has been to turn on Evil mode, learn about C-h {k,f,v,m} and M-x customize-group, and then slowly discover features when I needed them. IME this has been quite a natural process too.

I've heard of Evil mode before. Never tried it though. Maybe that could be the bridge that helps me come over to the bright side :)

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