I used Emacs very shortly, only as a text editor. The learning curve is horrible—my impression is that you need to memorize dozens of new keyboard shortcuts (and unlearn dozens of keyboard shortcuts more or less consistently accepted by many other applications, also clicking right mouse button for a context menu). There seem to be some interesting features, but again only for those who memorize the keyboard shortcuts. And the whole design seems like a character terminal emulator.
So the problem is that it looks interesting, but one has to pay a huge price ahead. That would make sense if I were already convinced that Emacs is the only editor and Lisp the only programming language I will use, but I just want to try them.
By the way, what exactly is so great about “the keyboard-only way of working”? Is it the speed of typing? I usually spend more time thinking about the problem than typing. Are some powerful features invoked by keyboard combos? I would prefer them to be available from the menu and context menu. Or both from menu and as a keyboard shortcut, so I can memorize the frequently-used ones, but not the rest. (Maybe this is possible in Emacs too. If yes, the tutorial should mention it.)
To me it now seems that learning Lisp with Emacs would be having two problems instead of one. More precisely, to make the learning curve even worse.
There’s a solution to the unfamiliar shortcuts problem: turn on CUA mode. CUA mode enables the familiar Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V for undo, cut, copy, and paste, respectively. For basic text navigation, I use Emacs mostly like an editor with standard bindings (the aforementioned undo-cut-copy-paste, arrow keys to move by character, Control plus arrow keys to move by word, &c.). There are other things to learn, but the transition isn’t really that bad.
By the way, what exactly is so great about “the keyboard-only way of working”? Is it the speed of typing? I usually spend more time thinking about the problem than typing. Are some powerful features invoked by keyboard combos?
Speed, features and working well for many languages (i.e. people have written Emacs modes for most language).
Having everything on the keyboard means that you don’t have to do so many context switches (which are annoying and I find they can distrupt my train of though). As an example, in most word processors, bolding text with Shift+arrow keys then Ctrl+B is much much nicer than moving to the mouse, carefully selecting the text and then going up to the menu bar to click the little icon.
And Emacs has been around for decades, so there are hundreds of little (or not so little) packages that do anything and everything, e.g. editing a file via SSH transparently is pretty nice.
Having one environment for writing a LaTeX report, a Markdown file, a C, Haskell, Python or Shell (etc) program is nice because the basic shortcuts are the same and every environment is guaranteed to act how you expect, so, for example, doing a regex string replacement is the same process.
And on the note of keyboard combos, they are something that you end up learning by muscle memory, so it takes a little while but they become second nature, to the point of not being able to say what the shortcut is straight out, only able to work it out by actually doing the action.
(That said, Emacs/Vim isn’t for everyone: maybe it’s the time investment is too large, or it doesn’t really suit one’s way of working.)
I used Emacs very shortly, only as a text editor. The learning curve is horrible—my impression is that you need to memorize dozens of new keyboard shortcuts (and unlearn dozens of keyboard shortcuts more or less consistently accepted by many other applications, also clicking right mouse button for a context menu). There seem to be some interesting features, but again only for those who memorize the keyboard shortcuts. And the whole design seems like a character terminal emulator.
So the problem is that it looks interesting, but one has to pay a huge price ahead. That would make sense if I were already convinced that Emacs is the only editor and Lisp the only programming language I will use, but I just want to try them.
By the way, what exactly is so great about “the keyboard-only way of working”? Is it the speed of typing? I usually spend more time thinking about the problem than typing. Are some powerful features invoked by keyboard combos? I would prefer them to be available from the menu and context menu. Or both from menu and as a keyboard shortcut, so I can memorize the frequently-used ones, but not the rest. (Maybe this is possible in Emacs too. If yes, the tutorial should mention it.)
To me it now seems that learning Lisp with Emacs would be having two problems instead of one. More precisely, to make the learning curve even worse.
There’s a solution to the unfamiliar shortcuts problem: turn on CUA mode. CUA mode enables the familiar Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V for undo, cut, copy, and paste, respectively. For basic text navigation, I use Emacs mostly like an editor with standard bindings (the aforementioned undo-cut-copy-paste, arrow keys to move by character, Control plus arrow keys to move by word, &c.). There are other things to learn, but the transition isn’t really that bad.
Speed, features and working well for many languages (i.e. people have written Emacs modes for most language).
Having everything on the keyboard means that you don’t have to do so many context switches (which are annoying and I find they can distrupt my train of though). As an example, in most word processors, bolding text with
Shift+arrow keysthenCtrl+Bis much much nicer than moving to the mouse, carefully selecting the text and then going up to the menu bar to click the little icon.And Emacs has been around for decades, so there are hundreds of little (or not so little) packages that do anything and everything, e.g. editing a file via SSH transparently is pretty nice.
Having one environment for writing a LaTeX report, a Markdown file, a C, Haskell, Python or Shell (etc) program is nice because the basic shortcuts are the same and every environment is guaranteed to act how you expect, so, for example, doing a regex string replacement is the same process.
And on the note of keyboard combos, they are something that you end up learning by muscle memory, so it takes a little while but they become second nature, to the point of not being able to say what the shortcut is straight out, only able to work it out by actually doing the action.
(That said, Emacs/Vim isn’t for everyone: maybe it’s the time investment is too large, or it doesn’t really suit one’s way of working.)