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Maybe I can offer an interesting perspective. Compared to most readers on this site, I’m likely on the younger side, I’m 20, at a university, and I’ve been programming since I was ~14. I used VS Code for the majority of my freshman year assignments, but decided to switch to emacs during my sophomore year, mostly because I’d heard interesting things about org mode, magit, and other packages, and I had a system programming class coming up that would require me to SSH into a VM and finish assignments on the VM. The initial muscle memory shift was scary, I repeatedly gave up on learning emacs, only to come back a couple days later and attempt it again. I started with Spacemacs/Doom Emacs, but both assumed I knew vim, and I found feature discoverability to be complicated. The fact that many packages were included made things more confusing, I tried to figure out what helm and Ivy were, and how to configure things, etc. The only time the process really stuck for me was installing vanilla emacs, reading a couple of tutorials on how the extension system worked, and just forcing myself to use it for every assignment I had. The built in tutorial was handy but I still don’t use the navigation commands most of the time. Nowadays, I can’t get out of emacs, I read my email in it, I use org mode for everything, and have it synced to my phone, I used lsp-mode at an internship this summer where I was writing Go, I’ve got autocomplete set up, etc. While an easier experience would help get people into emacs, I think the fact that you can really customize it in any way you want initially forces you to learn a lot more about your editor than any other editor. If I want autocomplete, I need to go figure out how to set it up, but there’s a plethora of resources. It teaches you how to be a better developer, always looking for new packages and sharpening your tools. |