I wish someone could write a "The Good Parts" book for Emacs. Even after reading the manual twice, I'm still overwhelmed with the API and forget even the most basic configuration options after a month of inactivity.
For understanding Elisp, I wrote an "Elisp Cheetsheet for Python Programmers" to help as a reference.
Blessing and a curse ? Maybe they should rebrand emacs as a universe and not an editor.. so that people know there are many galaxies to explore
What is more challenging is actually customizing Emacs to suit your own preferences, which is the main reason you would want to use it. Deciding which external packages to install, how to use and customize them, and writing your own packages. That is a lifelong endeavor and learning experience, just like programming. So it's to be expected that someone might be a long-time Emacs user, but not be aware of some of its features. You're not expected to know everything, nor do you need to. Just learn as much as you need to make it useful for you. Essentially, every Emacs installation is different, since it's purpose built for a specific use case according to very specific preferences. There's no singular "Emacs". And that is a beautiful thing. :)
Saying this as somebody who's been coevolving with emacs for 20 years already. Oh, all the little bits of lisp, all the mechanical memory, all the IDEs that came and went...
My emacs survived them all!
At this point, I believe that newcomers should jump straight to Neovim and file manager plugins, than deal with the stock stuff. That's just one thing out of many.
It’s pretty short and I felt like most of it was useful.
There's nano and multiple other editors for that. You want vim for a more powerful interactions than go left and write.
My need for vim is to open a file, go the the place I want to, quickly edit it, and go back to what I was doing (which is reading and thinking). Editing is just a short bust instead of being a continual activity.
Another annoyance with editors like VS Code (and the like) is how tedious to have information. Every file is in own tab (even though you can show more at once, but that's tedious). So you are always flipping back and forth. With vim, I can have everything at once in front of me, and once I have a clear line of action collapse it to the few (2 or 3) I need. Also quickly.
Vim and Emacs are for those that really needs them. There's a lot to learn, but that's because there's a lot you want to do.
It's quite possible you just don't need Emacs.
Look at the tutorial - it does everything it can to encourage you not to use the arrow keys or PGUP/PGDN. No, you're supposed to learn all kinds of whacky key combinations instead. That's all for a good reason but it's hardly encouraging for new users faced with the choice of doing things the "proper" way and building new muscle memory vs. using the keys they already know.
If all you want is a decent editor to get some work done without having to spend a fair amount of time learning the editor itself, Emacs probably isn't the best choice.
(To others reading this comment: Emacs editing commands have a hierarchy of sorts. It's powerful, and context-aware. But it requires you to internalize things like CTRL-f to move the cursor to the right. Unless you make the effort to learn them - or use evil-mode - you miss out on a good chunk of what makes Emacs so great for editing.)
So do I. ChatGPT4o and the like of course do not forget, and they've read more documentation, library code, and message forum postings than any human could. They know all the five or so ways to initialize per-buffer variables and will write you little snippets of Elisp to add to your .emacs or .dir-locals.el or per-file headers/trailers.
So, if Org-mode or multi-occur aren't doing what I want, and `M-x info-emacs-manual` doesn't make it obvious, ChatGPT4o is my next recourse.
There are many great applications and compatibility layers written to run on Emacs:
- Evil for a decent editor,
- calc for a good, flexible calculator,
- magit for version control,
- smerge for conflict resolution,
- dired, org, notmuch, tramp, eshell, outshine, comint, htmlize, etc.
and each of them deserves a "the good parts" book!
But. Doom is an uncanny valley for me. It looks like Emacs, but feels like something else entirely, something unlike I’ve ever used before. If you want to use all the things available inside Emacs without learning the “bare” version, right on. But if you actually want to learn Emacs, in my opinion, Doom isn’t it. It’s its own thing, and it’s a fine thing, but whatever it is, to me, it ain’t Emacs.
I have thought about rebuilding my config from scratch once again, with all the knowledge I gained over the years, but every time I think about it, I conclude that I inevitably would end up replicating some nice macros that Doom has, which do considerably reduce otherwise unavoidable boilerplate I'd have to write.
Doom may have improved discoverability of Emacs — a major complaint of newbies known for decades — but it can't magically make Emacs "something else entirely". I don't even get what you're talking about, it's like finding any complex package written in Elisp and lament that it doesn't even feel like an Emacs thing.
I mean, using the editor itself means maybe 10-15 keys/commands.
Mastering Emacs is a good overview, btw.