" Because the nature of Emacs is an extensible system, people write extensions to improve Emacs and share with others. The extensions improve various aspects of Emacs: Improve existing and add new editing features, integrate 3rd party tools, add programming languages supports, change Emacs appearance… Without the ability to extend, Emacs will just be another obscure editor with some useful features but cannot meet the demands of people, because different people have different needs, and Emacs maintainers cannot provide them all and integrate all into Emacs. With the ability to extend, people can bend Emacs the way they want, much like Lisp.
Unlike other editors which encourage users to stay with the default as much as they can, Emacs encourages users to customize and extend Emacs as much as they can."
http://tuhdo.github.io/emacs-tutor3.html
I just don't want to mix the two things: Emacs basics and Emacs extending together in a guide. It should be separate. I used to use packages a lot, until I realize that many built-in features which I didn't know serve me well. Learning stock Emacs is beneficial because users get the features that are always available.
> I started learning with Emacs Lisp Manual, not a tutorial or Emacs Manual and it got me up to speed in no time at all
I guess you method could work for, but I think it would be intimidating for most new users when they first read that to be able to use Emacs, they will have to learn Emacs Lisp. This is contrasting to everything else, even Vim.
Vanilla Emacs is definitely better than Notepad++ or Gedit:
- Emacs is an implementation of Emacs Lisp with an editor on top of it. The other editors are just... editors.
- Emacs has many useful features such as:
+ how to use mark and point and region. A useful feature is exchange-point-and-mark; other editors do not have this.
+ Dired
+ ibuffers, that can manage hundreds of buffers
+ a window management system (so you don't have to use things like tmux, screen)
+ registers, you can save anything, like window configuration, text, position
+ the help system
+ Bookmark (to quickly access things later)
+ Calc (a scientific calculator)
+ CEDET a language framework for building IDE features (like context-sensitive completion, jump, find references...). The best language it is supporting is C/C++, as demonstrated in the guide.
...more features that typical editors won't have...
Learning all these things should not require customization and external packages to further add burden to learners. After people learned something like Dired, if they want more, they can look it up for packages like Dired+.
Finally, Prelude disables arrow keys and encourage users to use key bindings like C-f, C-b... I think most of the key bindings for editing in Emacs are fine and make editing faster. Of course, the bindings are not as ergonomics as Vim, but it is still much better than other editors.
Since you don't like C-f, C-b... I guess you don't like key bindings with prefix C-x and C-c as well?