I first encountered Emacs on workstation UNIX (DEC, HPUX, SunOS, etc) at the university. Prior to that I’d been using a Mac so it was definitely somewhat alien.

I first encountered Emacs on workstation UNIX (DEC, HPUX, SunOS, etc) at the university. Prior to that I’d been using a Mac so it was definitely somewhat alien. But honestly it wasn’t that difficult. Many power users like to disable the menu, but I learned a lot from using it. That was back when the Mac “power user” culture was, essentially, use the menus to learn the keybinds. So it wasn’t that alien to me. Let me tell you, X-windows and fvwm2 was a real eye opener though. Up to that point I thought fiddling with RedEdit was UI customization.