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Have you read O'Reilly's Learning Emacs? I strongly recommend it. It's a useful tour guide. Failing that, have you read the tutorial? Have you read Steve Yegg

Have you read O'Reilly's Learning Emacs? I strongly recommend it. It's a useful tour guide. Failing that, have you read the tutorial? Have you read Steve Yegge's "Effective Emacs"? If none of that can help or inspire you then I probably don't have much chance. But I'll offer you some coaching anyway. Imagine Vince Lombardi reading this to you: Stop using the mouse. If you're using emacs and you're touching the mouse, you're doing it wrong. Stop fretting about the GUI. Why does your editor need a GUI? Emacs is a text editor, a program that is all about text. It's text all the way down. If it had more chrome, that would be wasting pixels that could be devoted to text. (Seriously: As Yegge will tell you, the true emacs user turns off the pull-down menus to make more room for text.) Stop worrying about "intuitive". Yes, until you get to know the moves, emacs is nonintuitive, kind of like the piano. No matter how expensive and well-designed a piano I buy, I won't be able to just sit down and play some Chopin. (Well, technically you can buy player pianos that will do just that, but what would a concert pianist call such an instrument? A toy.) You're learning an open-source text editor that's quite possibly older than you. You will live with this software for months, years, or decades. You don't need features that make it easy to learn emacs in five minutes. You need the features that make it worthwhile to use emacs after thirty years. And, yes, you haven't spent enough time. In particular, it's not just a matter of plugging away in emacs for weeks or months; it's unlike any other software you've ever used, and until you're oriented you won't find it easy to pick up things just by playing with it. You have to study it a little. Try some of the references. Try the Emacs Wiki.

MrRage 18y ago
I agree with what you said about about intuitive UIs. Intuitive just means familiar. After enough time, emacs (or vi, or any text edit) will be come familiar, i.e. you won't have to consciously think about using the editor. At that point it becomes intuitive.
- shiro 18y ago
  Agreed. Emacs is intuitive in a different way than those flashy GUI apps. One thing I really love in Emacs is that every text is basically displayed in a buffer, regardless of it being editing text, external program output, file listing, menu items or completion candidates. It means you can use common editing commands (incremental search, region selection, copy&paste, etc) uniformly to navigate those information. It's all text, so you should be able to do so. Then I turn to a supposedly intuitive GUI app that shows a menu with 100 items and I'm just lost since I cannot regexp-search through those items.
mixmax 18y ago
I just read Steve Yegge's "Effective Emacs", thanks for the link. It was very enlightening on many levels and told me several things that were written between the lines, namely: - Initial user experience is (very) secondary to long-term efficiency - if you aren't in this for the long term don't bother - the article actually suggestes swapping the caps lock key and the ctrl key to have it better positioned for emacs use... - unplug your mouse, the keyboard is faster once you learn how to do it well. It seems to me that Emacs is a friend for life, but only if you have the patience for a year or two of courting and learning its tweaks and quirks. I'll buy O'Reillys book and see how it goes.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  It isn't as bad as all that. A few weeks will suffice once you have proper guidance. But there's certainly years of material left after that, if you want it. After eight years off and on I still haven't touched a sizeable number of emacs features.
  - davidw 18y ago
    > But there's certainly years of material left after that, if you want it. After eight years off and on I still haven't touched a sizeable number of emacs features. Precisely. You can get productive with emacs after a relatively short period of time, but you will have a lifetime of learning afterwards. After 10 years, I'm still discovering new things.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  the article actually suggestes swapping the caps lock key and the ctrl key to have it better positioned for emacs use... UNIX/Linux users have considered this mandatory forever, regardless of editor choice. PC keyboards are simply wrong.
  - newt0311 18y ago
    No kidding. The Caps Lock key should never have existed on PC keyboards and the Tab key should be altered so that it is a "Cmd" key which switches fields in web-browsers, word completes as needed, indents code, and does everything it does now except for inserting an actual ascii tab character.
silentbicycle 18y ago
Just a nitpick: The O'Reilly book title is actually _Learning GNU Emacs_. (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006488/ http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006488/)

MrRage 18y ago

I agree with what you said about about intuitive UIs. Intuitive just means familiar. After enough time, emacs (or vi, or any text edit) will be come familiar, i.e. you won't have to consciously think about using the editor. At that point it becomes intuitive.

shiro 18y ago
Agreed. Emacs is intuitive in a different way than those flashy GUI apps. One thing I really love in Emacs is that every text is basically displayed in a buffer, regardless of it being editing text, external program output, file listing, menu items or completion candidates. It means you can use common editing commands (incremental search, region selection, copy&paste, etc) uniformly to navigate those information. It's all text, so you should be able to do so. Then I turn to a supposedly intuitive GUI app that shows a menu with 100 items and I'm just lost since I cannot regexp-search through those items.

mixmax 18y ago

I just read Steve Yegge's "Effective Emacs", thanks for the link. It was very enlightening on many levels and told me several things that were written between the lines, namely: - Initial user experience is (very) secondary to long-term efficiency - if you aren't in this for the long term don't bother - the article actually suggestes swapping the caps lock key and the ctrl key to have it better positioned for emacs use... - unplug your mouse, the keyboard is faster once you learn how to do it well. It seems to me that Emacs is a friend for life, but only if you have the patience for a year or two of courting and learning its tweaks and quirks. I'll buy O'Reillys book and see how it goes.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
It isn't as bad as all that. A few weeks will suffice once you have proper guidance. But there's certainly years of material left after that, if you want it. After eight years off and on I still haven't touched a sizeable number of emacs features.
- davidw 18y ago
  > But there's certainly years of material left after that, if you want it. After eight years off and on I still haven't touched a sizeable number of emacs features. Precisely. You can get productive with emacs after a relatively short period of time, but you will have a lifetime of learning afterwards. After 10 years, I'm still discovering new things.
SwellJoe 18y ago
the article actually suggestes swapping the caps lock key and the ctrl key to have it better positioned for emacs use... UNIX/Linux users have considered this mandatory forever, regardless of editor choice. PC keyboards are simply wrong.
- newt0311 18y ago
  No kidding. The Caps Lock key should never have existed on PC keyboards and the Tab key should be altered so that it is a "Cmd" key which switches fields in web-browsers, word completes as needed, indents code, and does everything it does now except for inserting an actual ascii tab character.

silentbicycle 18y ago

Just a nitpick: The O'Reilly book title is actually _Learning GNU Emacs_. (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006488/ http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006488/)