[raverbashing]

Ok let me be very honest here, let's look at both editors learning curves

- vi/vim

You need to learn to open a file, edit it, move around and exit and the edit/view mode. Everybody learns how to do it. At first it sucks but you can learn this in 5 min.

Nothing too hard, and yes, do use the direction keys, it's not the 70s anymore.

From there you can learn other things

- Emacs

You try reading anything about it, there's something about Meta key (and apparently nobody can say what the actual meta key is without some wrangling from them because who knows if you're not coding on a Sun Sparc from the 90s so they don't want to compromise).

Then something about a "prefix command" C-x (what is C? Control? Which other program uses C as an abbreviation for that?) Buffers. What's a buffer?

I tried opening the help of both programs, VIM shows exactly what I mentioned there. Move around, close this window, etc

Emacs? I'll copy-paste here (key bindings help)

> C-x Prefix Command

> \200 .. ÿ encoded-kbd-self-insert-ccl

> C-x 8 iso-transl-ctl-x-8-map

Why the F is this relevant or useful?

Then I try to quit and it's a bit of a wrangle until it gets Ctrl-C Ctrl-X right (or the other way)

Everything seems like it's actively fighting the user, and making it more difficult or convoluted than it should.

Usability problems are never the fault of the user.

[TeMPOraL]

> Nothing too hard, and yes, do use the direction keys, it's not the 70s anymore.

Yet another thing 70s got better than today's software. The defaults you're used to are a historical accident, and are also crap - that is, an impediment to productivity.

> I tried opening the help of both programs (...)

> Emacs? I'll copy-paste here (key bindings help)

How on Earth did you get there? The very first thing in the Help menu (also conveniently bound under C-h t, and also conveniently listed in help-for-help view that shows if you press C-h C-h) is the Emacs Tutorial. The thing that's designed to teach you the basics quickly. Just read and follow the instructions, and it will all make sense.

As for whatever you just pasted here (looks a bit like output of C-x ?), it's probably part of the self-documenting aspect of Emacs, which you're yet to discover. That is, you can get help and documentation on absolutely everything - including runtime values of key bindings, variables and functions (both C and elisp) used by Emacs.

> Everything seems like it's actively fighting the user, and making it more difficult or convoluted than it should.

It's not. It's just:

- following a (somewhat) consistent set of UX principles that are older than IBM CUA (which gave you CTRL+C / CTRL+V, etc.). Older does not mean worse.

- a tool for serious users, who are not afraid of spending 5-15 minutes reading the tutorial.

To be clear, I'm not arguing here for Emacs over Vim. I'm arguing here against the stupid - and stupidly common - approach that proper UX means a newcomer must be able to use the software productively after 30 seconds of exposure to it. It's a stupid approach, because the only way to do this is to dumb down the program to the point it does so little that it can be mastered in 30 seconds. Emacs, like Vim, and Blender, are tools for people who want to be productive. A prerequisite here is the willingness to learn something.

[raverbashing]

> The defaults you're used to are a historical accident, and are also crap

Agreed, that's why I use modern IDEs as well when vim gets in the way

> How on Earth did you get there?

f1 + ? then "describe bindings" which looks like the most relevant option

(I had opened a file with emacs first, I see the welcome page has more helpful guidance, but opening a file is usually what people do first)

> following a (somewhat) consistent set of UX principles that are older than IBM CUA

Sure, it's the same with vim, old standards

> a tool for serious users

Thanks for reinforcing my point that Emacs is more worried about gatekeeping people than being friendly

[TeMPOraL]

> Thanks for reinforcing my point that Emacs is more worried about gatekeeping people than being friendly

Any ideas how it could be better?

It has a built-in tutorial. It has thorough help. It welcomes you with instructions on getting help, as you noted yourself. There's plenty of guides and tutorials on-line, too. What else could it do to be more friendly, that would not involve sacrificing its productivity features?

Because it's not really gatekeeping - otherwise why would Emacs have so many, often annoying (myself included), evangelists? It's just about keeping the productivity ceiling high.

[raverbashing]

> Any ideas how it could be better?

There are a couple of things to explore. I've followed your suggestion and looked at the tutorial, which is fine for the most part (Alt didn't work but it's probably my terminal's fault, ESC ESC works but it's not great)

Compare it with vimtutor.

In the 1st page vim taught how to move around and how to close VIM. Emacs is still teaching 'PgUp/PgDown'. It teaches you how to insert text 7 pages down. Vimtutor: 3rd page

For this basic operations emacs is not harder than vim it is just that they go on and on on and don't get much to the point. To find out how to save a file you need to go all the way down and then read about 'buffers' and how your file is now a buffer and you save it (??)

And that seems to be the main difference. Everything is harder than it should be. Most shortcuts involve C-x something or C-x C-something (which is not very ergonomical). It does not share the conventions or even the vocabulary of other systems.

And something that applies to vim as well: Programs should cut the crap about using direction keys/PgUp/Down/Home/End. My 80s computer had them. Every modern computer has something similar to those operations and that works on all programs. "Oh but then you have to take your hands off of home" I do use a mouse and I do use other programs, as much as I like shortcuts, I have to move my hands and there are a lot of shortcuts outside of that area.

[TeMPOraL]

Thanks for your thoughts. The tutorial could definitely be improved and restructured.

> Most shortcuts involve C-x something or C-x C-something (which is not very ergonomical). It does not share the conventions or even the vocabulary of other systems.

Hey, Vim is the ergonomic one, Emacs is the extensible one (ergonomy improves somewhat with evil-mode, aka. vim emulation in Emacs) :).

> Programs should cut the crap about using direction keys/PgUp/Down/Home/End. My 80s computer had them. Every modern computer has something similar to those operations and that works on all programs. "Oh but then you have to take your hands off of home" I do use a mouse and I do use other programs, as much as I like shortcuts, I have to move my hands and there are a lot of shortcuts outside of that area.

The reasoning here is this: those conventions used in modern programs are hurting your productivity. Vim in particular is strongly optimized towards making your keypresses maximally efficient. Emacs much less so, but still, its defaults beat arrow keys, for which you need to move the entire hand.

FWIW, Emacs has cua-mode (named after that IBM CUA thing I mentioned), which gives you behaviour similar to every other program you know. Maybe it could be introduced to people earlier, but there's a good argument against it - CUA keybindings are really inferior to what vim/Emacs gives you.

[Draiken]

Honestly I feel that it has become more of a fame and dissimination thing than anything else.

I've seen VIM portrayed as this holy grail of productivity for several years now, while Emacs has always been portrayed as a quirky complex editor.

I'm a VIM user and never used Emacs (nothing against it) but, correct if I'm wrong, both have a similar philosophy and have a higher learning curve than modern editors. They're also both extremely powerful under the right hands.

When I first got into VIM, it was from some conference video showcasing it and how to get good at it. Now remembering back I don't think I ever saw a similar thing for Emacs. I've heard of VimCasts but never heard of EmacsCasts (or something like that). It probably exists, I just never heard of it.

Maybe that's what missing for Emacs?

Take all this with a grain of salt. I may just live in a bubble regarding this :D

[erikbye]

http://emacsrocks.com/

http://emacs.sexy/

[eadmund]

I think it's basically the Blub Paradox for editors: vi(m) is so much better than almost any editor, that its users think 'this, this is truly the best!' When they look at e.g. nano or Notepad++ or Atom, they can easily see how vi(m) is so much better, but when they look at emacs, they simply think, 'nah, I don't need to use that!'

The thing is, just like conditional, symbolic expressions and garbage collection are pretty important for writing expressive programs, so too a power extensible interface to textual information is important for communicating with a computer. vi(m) is a great editor, but emacs is a great editing environment.

[GlennS]

I don't think it's deliberate gatekeeping.

In the process of learning a tool thoroughly you forget what it was like to not know how to do it.

So, it becomes hard to write a good beginner's tutorial. And you forget why the things which help beginners are useful, so they just look like clutter.

Personally, I don't think that 10-15 minutes reading the Emacs tutorial is much help to anyone. However, I am glad that I have spent the past few years learning how to use Emacs (and I haven't even learned elisp properly yet), and grateful to the people who made it and all the great software around it.

[Timpy]

You're addressing something that is not really related to raverbashing's point. It's just a quick look at learning curves.

>I'm arguing here against the stupid - and stupidly common - approach that proper UX means a newcomer must be able to use the software productively after 30 seconds of exposure to it

No one here made the claim that Vim is better because you can be productive faster, nor was it said that productivity software should have no learning curve.

[krylon]

> use the direction keys, it's not the 70s anymore.

In my experience, the fact that I can navigate a file without taking my hands off the home row far outweighs any disadvantages hjkl might have.

With emacs, the big point is that you can do so many things in it that you never have to leave it; that also means once you have the keyboard shortcuts memorized, you can use them everywhere - besides editing text, emacs can serve as a mail client, a web browser, an IRC client, a music player, telnet/ssh client / terminal emulator (kind of), you can even play Nethack in emacs.

You can't expect to become fluent in emacs within a couple of minutes, but if you are willing to stick around, the time spent learning emacs pays off big time.

[TeMPOraL]

> that also means once you have the keyboard shortcuts memorized, you can use them everywhere

That's half of the benefit.

The other half is, in Emacs things compose and interoperate. That fancy autocomplete plugin you just installed? It will work for suggesting e-mail addresses just as well as for suggesting function calls in code. Multiple cursors? Regex search-and-replace? Keyboard macros? They work everywhere, whether you're writing code, exploring the filesystem, composing e-mails or tweeting/tooting on Mastodon.

That's the reason many people, myself included, try to move as much of their workflow as possible into Emacs. The right thinking is this: Emacs is an application platform for everything that uses text (or can be made to use text), and has much better defaults and interoperability capabilities than your regular operating system.

[bunderbunder]

As great as that is, though, they're all advantages that won't become relevant until you've really learned emacs, and won't become really advantageous unless you're comfortable enough with emacs that you're willing to commit to it.

In other words, its not stuff that's going to drive adoption. The ggp has a point about emacs having a higher barrier to entry for complete beginners.

[krylon]

But having to spend a lot of time getting familiar with some tool, language or framework is not unusual in IT/Programming. Think of C++, or the .Net framework. When programming in C#, I spend at least 1/3 of my time browsing the API documentation or StackOverflow, TechNet, etc.

With emacs, as with C++ or .Net, the idea is that the effort to get familiar with the environment pays off big time after a certain point.

If somebody asks me (that happens almost never, though), my reply is to tell them about the long term-benefits of using emacs and to give both emacs and vi a try and decide what they like better. And that emacs vs. vi is not necessarily an either-or-decision. I use emacs as my main editor, but I often find myself editing config files using vi. I prefer emacs, but vi/vim is an excellent editor, too. More generally speaking, if somebody tries to frame something like the choice of editor as an either-or-question, consider if a-as-well-as-b is a valid answer, too.

[bunderbunder]

Fair, though, I think the story is a bit different with editors. Ultimately they're just a means to an end (editing code), and it's obviously true that plenty of people are able to work successfully with either of them, so you can't really fault people for just picking one to learn and going with it. Learning both intimately enough to make a serious comparison is a time-consuming prospect.

I'm also inclined to say that, unless you work in a Windows shop, there really isn't any either-or to it. vim is, at this point, so pervasive that I think the real alternatives are either "just vim" or "emacs and at least a little bit of vim".

[krylon]

> you can't really fault people for just picking one to learn and going with it.

I do not. Maybe I was not clear enough, but I made the point in another comment that I totally understand why somebody would choose vim and never look back. I used vim as my editor of choice for a couple of years, and I cannot deny that it is an excellent editor. I still use some flavor of vi on a regular basis, even on OpenBSD, where mg (a lightweight editor that copies emacs' default keybindings) is part of the base system.

[__sr__]

> In my experience, the fact that I can navigate a file without taking my hands off the home row far outweighs any disadvantages hjkl might have.

In my experience, most (if not all) of the people who use Vim or Emacs are programmers — and I am including sysadmins etc. in the wide category of programmers — and a programmer typically spends far more time thinking about what to type than the actual typing[1]. So I don’t see how the speed of typing is synonymous with productivity.

[1] Unless it’s a Java programmer — they spend most of their time typing — just kidding.

[JdeBP]

You pressed the wrong foot-pedal for help, there.

* http://jdebp.info./Humour/exiting-emacs.html

[OskarS]

Your comparison is a little unfair. If you just want to use it as a text editor, Emacs is easier to use than Vim. You can move around with the arrow keys, typing letters inserts them into the document, there are the standard menus, toolbars and scrollbars you would expect. In other words, if you're looking for a "Notepad replacement", Emacs works just fine as that, and you don't have to learn anything about the meta key or whatever.

I agree that Emacs overall is more complex overall (which is not necessarily a bad thing), but from a "first impressions" perspective, Emacs wins.

[erikbye]

To first-time Emacs users:

Do M-x (alt-x) and type help-with-tutorial, hit your enter key (RET in Emacs jargon).

[zealsham]

Have you tried exiting vim? :D

[JD557]

I know this was intended as a joke, but exiting vim is now much easier than exiting emacs (IMO), assuming that the user has some experience with UNIX and uses `Ctrl+C` to exit most programs.

If I start vim and press `Ctrl+C` I get an helpful message saying "Type :qa and press <Enter> to abandon all changes and exit Vim".

If I do the same on emacs, first the help screen disappears (which was the one telling me to use `C-x C-c` to exit emacs and then I just get stuck with an unhelpful message about creating new files.

[scbrg]

You could try opening the File menu and selecting Quit :)

[atilaneves]

vim is a text-mode program. Emacs is not. Exiting is easy for anyone, just click the x in the window and poof! It's gone.

[raverbashing]

Yes, I press F1 (help) it shows me this:

> Get out of Vim: Use ":qa!<Enter>" (careful, all changes are lost!)

The joke is not relevant anymore

[thomasahle]

Try exiting `ed`. Much more fun.

[michaelmrose]

When you first open emacs the first buffer says

";; This buffer is for text that is not saved, and for Lisp evaluation. ;; To create a file, visit it with C-x C-f and enter text in its buffer"

It comes with a Menubar as found on most applications and rightmost is one labeled help, the first entry goes to the tutorial

"Emacs tutorial. See end for copying conditions.

Emacs commands generally involve the CONTROL key (sometimes labeled CTRL or CTL) or the META key (sometimes labeled EDIT or ALT). Rather than write that in full each time, we'll use the following abbreviations:

C-<chr> means hold the CONTROL key while typing the character <chr> Thus, C-f would be: hold the CONTROL key and type f. M-<chr> means hold the META or EDIT or ALT key down while typing <chr>. If there is no META, EDIT or ALT key, instead press and release the ESC key and then type <chr>. We write <ESC> for the ESC key.

Important note: to end the Emacs session, type C-x C-c. (Two characters.) To quit a partially entered command, type C-g. To stop the tutorial, type C-x k, then <Return> at the prompt. The characters ">>" at the left margin indicate directions for you to try using a command. For instance:

>> Now type C-v (View next screen) to scroll down in the tutorial. (go ahead, do it by holding down the CONTROL key while typing v). From now on, please do this whenever you reach the end of the screen."

It goes on at length covering all basic aspects of using emacs. Under the help menu there is also an extensive manual.

If this isn't discoverable enough a logical response would be to type Emacs tutorial into your favourite search engine and read at least one of the results. You say "Usability problems are never the fault of the user." and your not wrong per se but tools have intended audience and reasonable expectations. Scalpels and coffee pots are made for different users and its challenging to make a scalpel that would enable a surgeon to remove an appendix without having to crack a book.

Microsoft office which is aimed at a much broader and less skilled user base makes it very easy to enter a little text but its very normal for users to receive training, google for answers, and RTFM.

Regardless of what anyone hopes neither vim or emacs are much used by random joe to read their email they are tools made by technical people for technical people.

Given the audience I don't think its unreasonable to suppose that people who bypass both tutorials, and manual in favour of describe bindings and leave without a pit stop at the search engine might be the cause of their own discontent.

Let me make a wild guess here. You got frustrated. Took a minute to consult google to figure it out and moved on but you left that part out because it didn't support your position.

[cup-of-tea]

> You need to learn to open a file, edit it, move around and exit and the edit/view mode. Everybody learns how to do it. At first it sucks but you can learn this in 5 min.

> Nothing too hard, and yes, do use the direction keys, it's not the 70s anymore.

All of that applies to emacs too. What's the difference?

> Usability problems are never the fault of the user.

That's contrary to the old saying: a bad workman always blames his tools.

[jholman]

> That's contrary to the old saying: a bad workman always blames his tools

That is not what that means.

If GP had said "I cannot write good code in Emacs", that'd be a poor craftsman blaming their tools. But saying "this tool is not as effective as this other tool" is a thing that good craftsmen do.

(I'm not addressing the original claim, just meta-meta-critiquing your meta-critique).

[close04]

Usability is always and without a doubt the responsibility of the designer. The old saying might be valid for tools that are meant for complex tasks. Expert level tools where doing the job a certain way is more important than doing it intuitively. In reality that saying is mostly used as an excuse for a tool that could be more effective but isn't.

If something as basic as a text editor is so unintuitive it is not the user's fault.

There's always the option of providing better examples or documentation, or a more intuitive "control scheme" which allows users to toggle between "old" and "new".

The fact that some tools choose to do it "the hard way" is almost entirely rooted in tradition and reluctance to do it another way. Not because it's better.

[raverbashing]

> All of that applies to emacs too. What's the difference?

It's in the post

> That's contrary to the old saying: a bad workman always blames his tools.

It doesn't go contrary. Some tools are bad, some don't.

That's why I choose the tool that doesn't get in the way and don't blame me for not joining their cult: vim