| > 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. |
> 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.