[pmoriarty]

Elisp (or even better, Guile) are definitely huge reasons to use emacs for me, but there are many, many other things I use it for instead of vim (which I also know, and have used for over 20 years).

org-mode and w3m (a web browser that can be integrated in to emacs) are my two biggest draws, but eventually I mean to get the mail client working, give the shell modes another try, and maybe get the irc and RSS clients going too. The sky's the limit with emacs, while vim does more closely stick to being just an editor.

All that said, I still use vim when I need it, such as for getting syntax highlighting of strace files, which last time I checked, emacs did not have a mode for. vim is also often much faster on large files.

[sigzero]

org-mode is what makes me stop and go "Hmmmm" about finally throwing in the towel and using it. I really hate the key combos though.

[ska]

   I really hate the key combos though.

Why not change them?

[bloaf]

A beginner would not want to break compatibility with every tutorial/instruction manual. They would be faced with decisions about the placement of shortcuts they're not even sure what they do. They definitely wouldn't have the perspective to create logical families of shortcuts.

So of course the solution is to suffer the bad shortcut placement in Emacs long enough to not need tutorials and fully understand what you're doing, then throw all the intuition you've gained out the window by remapping everything.

[OvidNaso]

Oh, the beauty of emacs, the self-documenting editor...This is highlighted at the top of the built in tutorial if you change your keybindings:

>NOTICE: The main purpose of the Emacs tutorial is to teach you the most important standard Emacs commands (key bindings). However, your Emacs has been customized by changing some of these basic editing commands, so it doesn't correspond to the tutorial. We have inserted colored notices where the altered commands have been introduced. [More]

[More] is a list of the default keybinding, the command, and how to access the command in "your" emacs.

The keybindings are also changed throughout the entire manual (C-h i) I believe.

[ryukafalz]

Would it maybe be useful to have some framework for creating tutorials inside emacs? In that case, the tutorial could just check which shortcut(s) are defined for a given command, and update the tutorial text to reflect that.

[tarboreus]

Might want to try Spacemacs.