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Comment by spit2wind | Hacker News Reader

The thing about Emacs isn't it's key bindings. It's the extensibility and integration of the overall system.

As others say, begin with the built in tutorial. It should be as simple opening Emacs and pressing enter. If for some reason it's not that simple, open Emacs and press Control+h followed by 't'. The tutorial walks you through the basics. The tutorial mentions C-h v. There is also C-h f for functions.

Next, when you're ready, learn Emacs Lisp. You can read An Introduction to Emacs Lisp online or within Emacs (using C-h i eintr).

Otherwise, hack and extend it. The joy of Emacs is that it presents you with programming problems at the threshold of your understanding. You decide whether to dip in. It provides you amazing resources to do it.

I hope you find a speedy recovery to your injury and have fun with Emacs.

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> The thing about Emacs isn't it's key bindings. It's the extensibility and integration of the overall system.

Well, I guess Emacs is many things to different people. After using Helix for quite some time the single thing I missed was exactly the Emacs keybindings. Not plugins, although I've used quite a lot of them.

I like how I can use my Emacs-learned keybindings to navigate native text fields in the OS (e.g., CAPS(ctrl) + a, or + e, to get to line beginning and end; also +h instead of 'delete', keeping my fingers on the home row).

I miss the bindings, too, when using applications that don't support them. In those situations (and other situations beyond simple key assignment), I reach for the extensibility to modify the system...and find nothing that compares.

I'm curious, what do you like about the Emacs key bindings? Is it the GNU system integration, like with Bash?

At some level the keybindings are arbitrary. Some were designated before the contemporary keyboard existed. Of course, they may fit you better just because and that's great.

For me, it's being able to do much, much more than the "standard" editor keys, and the (mostly) coherence. And the ability to easily add more to do what I want.

> I'm curious, what do you like about the Emacs key bindings? Is it the GNU system integration, like with Bash?

Nah, I actually don't use them I'm Bash that frequently.

It may be just due to the non-modal way of the hot keys. With Helix I frequently press Esc far too many times to be sure I'm in a right mode (just like I press C on a calculator a couple of times to clear it).

I've got caps remapped to control and somehow most of the shortcuts that I use quickly got into my muscle memory in a way that Helix's don't. I guess it's just hard for me to put into words why is that.

Using meow:https://github.com/meow-edit/meow I actually got keybindings in Emacs that are helix-like, so I use helix for certain projects and Emacs for others.

The muscle memory transfers well.

I personally like the Emacs keybinds because they are also supported in Cocoa Text framework, which means native Mac applications respect them. It's not just the terminal that follows these keybinds, but every graphical program in my system. You can actually use S-c / S-v and C-k / C-y to maintain two clipboards at once. This is a feature I miss every time I have to use a computer that is not a Mac. I also like being able to use C-a, C-e, C-k, and move between words with M-<left> and M-<right>. In the case of Emacs, the proper keybinds are M-f and M-b, but Mac also uses meta key as a sort of compose key, so this is the keybind used in graphical applications.

Thank you; extensibility in a lisp is one of the draws for me, I just wish it was easier to re-teach my brain’s relationship with my fingers.

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