Swing by the Emacs side ;) We got vim bindings too!
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You can learn Emacs in one day. Every day!
Hey I know where that’s from!
As an Emacs user, his video was very funny https://youtu.be/urcL86UpqZc?si=Jhqiy1yCXDGHoIoS
I've spent 2 month trying out emacs and I feel like I sort of scratched the surface. It's like the deeper you look the more you realize how much more there is
My biggest revelation was when I realized how to use Emacs to learn about Emacs. Knowing where to look up function, variable definitions etc was an eye opener in my understanding of how things work and are piped together
There was a time when this was the obvious thing to do when making systems. Sadly that's forgotten. Manpages to read on cli tooling is the same thing of course. Yet people rather go to another window, the browser, and go to a ad-driven website and get the same output as the manpage would give.
These days people rather switch to a browser window, open an LLM of their choice in a new tab and in verbose English ask "how do I do X in this popular program Y?".
Then get a hallucinated answer and come to you to complain about a missing cli option, while it's literally there, in their terminal, just one -h away. True story (had to vent out, thanks for listening).
Hey, now.
When I want to ask an LLM how to do something in emacs I `SPC $ g g` and ask it in a gptel buffer.
The only 2¢ I can add here is that LLMs are surprisingly good for solving tasks that involve Elisp. There's large corpus of Emacs Lisp in the wild - the amount of it on GitHub alone is shocking.
For comparison - whenever I try using a model to write some Neovim config stuff, LLMs hallucinate badly.
Using Emacs these days is so much fun - you just ask a model and you can immediately try things - not only without restarting - you don't even have to save anything, anywhere.
You can even make Emacs do things that involve tools and languages that have nothing to do with elisp, e.g., "write elisp that would open all nested dirs in a given folder, and then run magit-log for each project, searching for specific pattern... and if found, issue npm or uv pip install with arguments...", etc.
I think the problem that most beginners try to explore the editor features, instead of focusing on main fundamental truth about Emacs - it's not just an editor, it's a Lisp system with a built-in editor.
I think focusing on understanding how Lisp drives Emacs can remarkably speed up the pace of learning it. Every key press and button click hooks up to a Lisp function. Even complex keyboard macros translate to Lisp command sequences.
1. Figure out structural editing commands to move s-expressions freely - those parens only feel annoying initially, later they become friendly.
2. Understand REPL-driven development - any expression can be evaled in-place.
3. Try the build-in profiler.
4. Learn the debugger.
5. Use the describe- commands. Emacs can "describe" to you every key, function, command, symbol, input methods, themes, fonts, characters, etc.
Emacs is really not about "what it can or cannot do" in general sense. It's all about "what you can do with it". Learn some basic elisp - and you will be able to achieve a lot.
I'm going to give a counterpoint to this (common) take.
I was an Emacs power user for almost a decade before I learned Emacs Lisp. I knew just the bare minimum to populate my .emacs file, and occasionally copied others' config snippets.
No need to rush into learning Elisp.
You just unironically proved my point. Who's got a decade to spare, when they can wield the power in just a couple of months?
> Who's got a decade to spare, when they can wield the power in just a couple of months?
I was a power user within months - a year tops. I didn't say it took me 10 years to become a power user.
Ever since I learned Elisp (it's been many years), I wouldn't say my expertise and abilities has grown exponentially. It is merely an incremental improvement. It definitely is nice that I can now code away annoyances, but it's not the game changer people make it out to be.
> I wouldn't say my expertise and abilities has grown exponentially
Things always look easier only after you solve a problem, don't they?
That is a known as hindsight bias (also called the "knew-it-all-along" effect). Once you've solved a problem or seen the solution, it seems obvious and you tend to overestimate how predictable or easy it was.
There's related phenomena known as the curse of knowledge - difficulty imagining not knowing something once you know it.
"The Mythical Man-Month" - discusses on why we underestimate complexity, it explains the psychology behind it.
There's also "forgetting the beginner's journey" or the "fourth stage" of learning where skills become so automatic you can't easily explain them.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
Im going on a decade now, and there's always still more (in a good way)!