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Comment by donniezazen | Hacker News Reader

I started learning Emacs and then forgot what I learned after a few days. Steep learning curve is quite depressing. And then their are great IDEs like Android Studio and Qt Creator for programming and LibreOffice for writing. What would I gain if I put time and energy in learning Emacs?

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A great custom tailored environment that can be adapted for whatever you might need in the future. I used to balk at it because it seemed like too big of a hassle to setup such a customized system if you changed machines (so i stuck to vanilla vim), but ubiquitous version control makes this less of an issue. If you are good with vim install the evil package and you will be ahead of (some of) the curve.

As a beginner, I find it very comfortable to hit a few click to build an app or fast prototype using xml/layout editor and I don't see that happening in Emacs, unless I am wrong.

I have recently started using Android Studio and it so quick to give you code suggestion aka code completion. It has literally reduced the amount of time I have to spend writing code by many folds. Is that possible in Emacs?

Over the past few months, I have developed an opinion that Emacs is more suited for old school guys who hacked early computers. As someone who started programming with IDEs on modern computer, one isn't really aware of lackings of IDEs, if any.

The first editor I used was HomeSite in the mid 1990s. I eventually wanted a more powerful editor. Many programmers recommended Emacs and Vim, but their learning curves seemed too steep. I switched from HomeSite to jEdit in the late 1990s because some jEdit users argued that jEdit had the power of Emacs but without the steep learning curve.

I used jEdit for a few years, but eventually I needed to program in a language for which there wasn't a good jEdit plugin available. That's when I switched to Emacs. It took me several full days to make the switch, much shorter than I expected it would, but I was far more experienced at that point than I was when I first heard of Emacs.

I wish I had switched to Emacs sooner, mostly because of Org mode, which has changed my life. Even if I were to start using an IDE because of a job requirement or whatever, I would still use Emacs for knowledge management.

FYI, I don't code in Java, and many people who do prefer IDEs, even some Emacs users.

> LibreOffice for writing.

My personal wiki consists of thousands of documents and it's powered by Emacs' Org mode. There are numerous benefits to having a knowledge base stored as plain text files that are managed using a powerful text editor, such as the ability to refer to any document in my wiki in under two seconds. I use my wiki hundreds of times per day, and the thought of using LibreOffice or Word to manage a similarly-sized knowledge base is unpleasant.

Have you ever blogged about your personal wiki or knowledge management as you say in the other comment? I am interested in knowing more about for my personal needs. What kind of information do you store in your org-mode like journals, goals, projects - personal or work related, quick notes, etc.? Do you use Emacs GUI or in terminal?

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