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For the record, the intent of my original post was just to see if someone had already encountered and solved my problem (having difficulty finding Emacs command

For the record, the intent of my original post was just to see if someone had already encountered and solved my problem (having difficulty finding Emacs commands, due to inexperience). The use of “archaic”, etc. was meant humorously, and not as a complaint about Emacs. I wouldn’t mind if the maintainers added some more modern synonyms for commonly needed commands, but I wouldn’t expect them to.

_a_a_a_ 3y ago
The following is my personal experience only. When I decided to learn Emacs I bought a book (the fat O'Reilly one),sat down and practised the keystrokes. I made a few scratch notes as well. Within a few hours, not days, I found movement to be extremely straightforward and much more comfortable than the old windows/mac way, for the great part. When I was doing my own project I would do most of my work in Emacs but regularly swap back to VStudio because of its LSP support. Swapping back and forth between these two very different environments brought on a few mistakes (wrong key in wrong editor) but astonishingly few. I got comfortable doing switches pretty quickly which is surprising because they are so utterly different, but that's how I found it to be. I ended up spending more time in VS because of better LSP, but built-in LSP support is coming in the next Emacs. Good. Because once I went back to 'standard' keyboard commands, I never felt comfortable. It just doesn't feel right. Also Emacs is so vastly more capable in some ways it just blows VS away. In other ways VS is better certainly, in the more advanced technical stuff such as LSP, in other ways, screw it. So: grab a book, prepared to put in a bit of time, good luck! (Edit: just remembered, I certainly did buy the book but started off doing the built-in Emacs tutorial before that)
- schemescape 3y ago
  That's a very thoughtful response, thanks. It would be nice if I could see into the future to know whether or not my time spent learning Emacs will pay off :)
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    Good luck with your decision, whichever it is! My only suggestion is avoid Gnus which I found an incredibly flaky mess and regretted ever touching it.

_a_a_a_ 3y ago

The following is my personal experience only. When I decided to learn Emacs I bought a book (the fat O'Reilly one),sat down and practised the keystrokes. I made a few scratch notes as well. Within a few hours, not days, I found movement to be extremely straightforward and much more comfortable than the old windows/mac way, for the great part. When I was doing my own project I would do most of my work in Emacs but regularly swap back to VStudio because of its LSP support. Swapping back and forth between these two very different environments brought on a few mistakes (wrong key in wrong editor) but astonishingly few. I got comfortable doing switches pretty quickly which is surprising because they are so utterly different, but that's how I found it to be. I ended up spending more time in VS because of better LSP, but built-in LSP support is coming in the next Emacs. Good. Because once I went back to 'standard' keyboard commands, I never felt comfortable. It just doesn't feel right. Also Emacs is so vastly more capable in some ways it just blows VS away. In other ways VS is better certainly, in the more advanced technical stuff such as LSP, in other ways, screw it. So: grab a book, prepared to put in a bit of time, good luck! (Edit: just remembered, I certainly did buy the book but started off doing the built-in Emacs tutorial before that)

schemescape 3y ago
That's a very thoughtful response, thanks. It would be nice if I could see into the future to know whether or not my time spent learning Emacs will pay off :)
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  Good luck with your decision, whichever it is! My only suggestion is avoid Gnus which I found an incredibly flaky mess and regretted ever touching it.