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Emacs could be much more alive if it actually had good documentation. Leaning Vim is also painful, but compared to learning Emacs it's a breeze. I've tried lea

Emacs could be much more alive if it actually had good documentation. Leaning Vim is also painful, but compared to learning Emacs it's a breeze. I've tried learning both. I'm currently a Neovim user, and every now and then I revisit Emacs in hope of learning how to unlock its (alleged) powers. I give up every time because it is just too frustrating to even get to the point where I can smoothly edit a .c file.

ssivark 3y ago
Not sure what you mean by Emacs needing better documentation — IME it is exemplary of particularly good documentation + introspection, integrated well with the editor.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  Maybe it's too dry for todays culture. You can see numerous people asking for a specific way to communicate: clear single page of features, live tutorials etc I agree that emacs comes with almost all you need to understand it, but there's one inherent flaw: it's large. It's a joke in the community that nobody is immune to a late "wait, emacs can do that ? I've been using it for N decades and I had no idea.."
  - NeutralForest 3y ago
    Content discovery is somewhat hard, especially in the beginning when you don't know enough of the vocabulary and capabilities to easily find what you want. Ironically, it's at that time in your journey learning how Emacs works, that you need the discovering capabilities the most.
    - agumonkey 3y ago
      True. But there are a few paradoxes. Back in the days there was not a log to learn.. limited internet, basic html pages. I think people asking for too much is also backward. Good concepts don't come easy in a way. ... I guess there's a balance. One thing that I wondered is how to make the manual more lispy/repl oriented.
      - NeutralForest 3y ago
        That's fair, I think the style is too dry sometimes but now that I've used Emacs for some time (3 years?) I just look into the pkg docs when I need something, which is rare.
berkes 3y ago
It might be a bubble I've been pulled in long ago. But I get a lot more content in general on vim/nvim. I've tried a few times to move to emacs. Partly FOMO (I might be missing out, by sticking with vim/nvim). But found it hard to find good lectures, articles, beginners guides, and YouTubers on emacs. At least not as good, frequent and omnipresent as such content for vim. I might've searched wrong. I'm probably biased, and quite certainly in a filter bubble. But the accessibility of good, modern content on vim/nvim is what made me decide to just stay there.
NeutralForest 3y ago
I think Emacs has excellent docs tbh, the docs page online are usually very good and within Emacs as well as in `info-mode`. What is sometimes confusing though is the large amount of jargon and details you need to know to get in a place where it works as excepted. Half because Emacs was created before modern conventions in naming stuff but also because it's a complex piece of software (or at least it has the potential for great complexity).
Ferret7446 3y ago
Emacs has very good documentation. It's just that most people nowadays can't read, and if they can read, their attention span is too short for long form content. You bring up a good point about Vim though. Because Vim has much fewer features, its docs are comparatively shorter and thus more accessible for people nowadays.
iLemming 3y ago
> if it actually had good documentation Great trolling. Emacs has remarkably good documentation. You can look up the documentation of any function and command. You are not even allowed to ship an extension (package) for Emacs to any major package repository without properly linting and ensuring that every single publicly used function has a proper docstring, where each argument is documented, and each docstring is properly formatted and punctuation is in place. > I give up every time because it is just too frustrating It's quite alright. I gave up multiple times before finally moving over. The biggest revelation I had is that instead of trying to "understand the features" of the editor, I needed to start learning Emacs Lisp and how to properly write it. How standard hooks work, how to use --debug-init to analyze what's being loaded; how edebug and built-in profiler work, how to investigate exactly what happens when I press a key, etc. Just be patient, Emacs is a beast, nobody ever tamed it in one day. It takes time and patience.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  > > if it actually had good documentation > Great trolling. I didn't mean to troll, but I definitely could've phrased it better. I don't mean Emacs has bad documentation - in fact, as one of the oldest GNU packages around (and RMS' own pet project), it probably has the most comprehensive documentation around. But, as other people have mentioned, it's too damn large. Eight chapters until I get to the basic editing commands! And that's just the default keybindings - which, according to most Emacs users, suck and need to be changed to your own taste with keyboard macros - which are waiting for you on the eighteenth chapter! Maybe I'm a youngster spoiled by television and videogames and need to get off your lawn, but having to read eighteen chapters just to get to make my own keyboard mappings is... discouraging. In contrast, learning Vim took me an hour of Vimtutor, then slowly discovering feature by feature when I needed it. It was a much more natural process than all my attempts to learn Emacs.
  - mapreduce 3y ago
    > but having to read eighteen chapters just to get to make my own keyboard mappings is... That's a very disingenuous way of deflecting your lack of motivation for learning Emacs on 18 chapters of documentation. I'm sure you code in some programming language, maybe multiple of them even. I'm sure each such programming language comes with tons of documentation. Do you read the whole language manuals/books before you start doing something useful with it? Or do you just learn the basics and look up what you need as you figure it out? The basics of Emacs are easily accessible from C-h t and that's the first thing Emacs shows in its welcome screen when you launch it the first time. It takes less time to finish that C-h t tutorial than it takes to learn the basics of a new programming language. Nobody really reads 18 chapters of documentation before making keyboard mappings. I make keyboard mappings and I read 0 chapters of the documentation. 0. Zero. How? Just like you do anything else in software these days? Looking it up, jumping directly to the documentation I needed to learn how to do key maps. There's nothing special about doing things in Emacs. You can learn Emacs just the way you learn any programming language. What might be different about learning Rust or Python might be that most people find themselves motivated to learn it so they are motivated enough to look up what they need. But many people are not so motivated to learn what they perceive as merely an editor. If you do not have the motivation to learn Emacs the same way, that's fine. But blaming it on the large documentation does not seem fair.
aki237 3y ago
And here I was thinking emacs had excellent documentation, unlike VimL (neovim not counted)

ssivark 3y ago

Not sure what you mean by Emacs needing better documentation — IME it is exemplary of particularly good documentation + introspection, integrated well with the editor.

agumonkey 3y ago
Maybe it's too dry for todays culture. You can see numerous people asking for a specific way to communicate: clear single page of features, live tutorials etc I agree that emacs comes with almost all you need to understand it, but there's one inherent flaw: it's large. It's a joke in the community that nobody is immune to a late "wait, emacs can do that ? I've been using it for N decades and I had no idea.."
- NeutralForest 3y ago
  Content discovery is somewhat hard, especially in the beginning when you don't know enough of the vocabulary and capabilities to easily find what you want. Ironically, it's at that time in your journey learning how Emacs works, that you need the discovering capabilities the most.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    True. But there are a few paradoxes. Back in the days there was not a log to learn.. limited internet, basic html pages. I think people asking for too much is also backward. Good concepts don't come easy in a way. ... I guess there's a balance. One thing that I wondered is how to make the manual more lispy/repl oriented.
    - NeutralForest 3y ago
      That's fair, I think the style is too dry sometimes but now that I've used Emacs for some time (3 years?) I just look into the pkg docs when I need something, which is rare.

berkes 3y ago

It might be a bubble I've been pulled in long ago. But I get a lot more content in general on vim/nvim. I've tried a few times to move to emacs. Partly FOMO (I might be missing out, by sticking with vim/nvim). But found it hard to find good lectures, articles, beginners guides, and YouTubers on emacs. At least not as good, frequent and omnipresent as such content for vim. I might've searched wrong. I'm probably biased, and quite certainly in a filter bubble. But the accessibility of good, modern content on vim/nvim is what made me decide to just stay there.

NeutralForest 3y ago

I think Emacs has excellent docs tbh, the docs page online are usually very good and within Emacs as well as in `info-mode`. What is sometimes confusing though is the large amount of jargon and details you need to know to get in a place where it works as excepted. Half because Emacs was created before modern conventions in naming stuff but also because it's a complex piece of software (or at least it has the potential for great complexity).

Ferret7446 3y ago

Emacs has very good documentation. It's just that most people nowadays can't read, and if they can read, their attention span is too short for long form content. You bring up a good point about Vim though. Because Vim has much fewer features, its docs are comparatively shorter and thus more accessible for people nowadays.

iLemming 3y ago

> if it actually had good documentation Great trolling. Emacs has remarkably good documentation. You can look up the documentation of any function and command. You are not even allowed to ship an extension (package) for Emacs to any major package repository without properly linting and ensuring that every single publicly used function has a proper docstring, where each argument is documented, and each docstring is properly formatted and punctuation is in place. > I give up every time because it is just too frustrating It's quite alright. I gave up multiple times before finally moving over. The biggest revelation I had is that instead of trying to "understand the features" of the editor, I needed to start learning Emacs Lisp and how to properly write it. How standard hooks work, how to use --debug-init to analyze what's being loaded; how edebug and built-in profiler work, how to investigate exactly what happens when I press a key, etc. Just be patient, Emacs is a beast, nobody ever tamed it in one day. It takes time and patience.

bheadmaster 3y ago
> > if it actually had good documentation > Great trolling. I didn't mean to troll, but I definitely could've phrased it better. I don't mean Emacs has bad documentation - in fact, as one of the oldest GNU packages around (and RMS' own pet project), it probably has the most comprehensive documentation around. But, as other people have mentioned, it's too damn large. Eight chapters until I get to the basic editing commands! And that's just the default keybindings - which, according to most Emacs users, suck and need to be changed to your own taste with keyboard macros - which are waiting for you on the eighteenth chapter! Maybe I'm a youngster spoiled by television and videogames and need to get off your lawn, but having to read eighteen chapters just to get to make my own keyboard mappings is... discouraging. In contrast, learning Vim took me an hour of Vimtutor, then slowly discovering feature by feature when I needed it. It was a much more natural process than all my attempts to learn Emacs.
- mapreduce 3y ago
  > but having to read eighteen chapters just to get to make my own keyboard mappings is... That's a very disingenuous way of deflecting your lack of motivation for learning Emacs on 18 chapters of documentation. I'm sure you code in some programming language, maybe multiple of them even. I'm sure each such programming language comes with tons of documentation. Do you read the whole language manuals/books before you start doing something useful with it? Or do you just learn the basics and look up what you need as you figure it out? The basics of Emacs are easily accessible from C-h t and that's the first thing Emacs shows in its welcome screen when you launch it the first time. It takes less time to finish that C-h t tutorial than it takes to learn the basics of a new programming language. Nobody really reads 18 chapters of documentation before making keyboard mappings. I make keyboard mappings and I read 0 chapters of the documentation. 0. Zero. How? Just like you do anything else in software these days? Looking it up, jumping directly to the documentation I needed to learn how to do key maps. There's nothing special about doing things in Emacs. You can learn Emacs just the way you learn any programming language. What might be different about learning Rust or Python might be that most people find themselves motivated to learn it so they are motivated enough to look up what they need. But many people are not so motivated to learn what they perceive as merely an editor. If you do not have the motivation to learn Emacs the same way, that's fine. But blaming it on the large documentation does not seem fair.

aki237 3y ago

And here I was thinking emacs had excellent documentation, unlike VimL (neovim not counted)