[ZackOfAllTrades]

That is how emacs has felt to me. There was a large amount of upfront learning, more than there probably should be for this example to make perfect sense, but after a few months with it I am able to do the basics pretty well. Every time I wish I could do something in emacs, a little bit of googling shows that there is a key binding for exactly what I want. So bit by bit, emacs is going from a weird text editor that does the basics into something way more useful than I thought.

/noob rant about the magic, magic!, of using emacs.

[endgame]

I also came here to talk about emacs. Two of the things that I think made it this way:

* Scripts such as keywiz let you incrementally improve your knowledge.

* Having a REPL in scratch means you can interactively tweak things.

[jrockway]

Having a REPL in scratch means you can interactively tweak things.

IELM is more of a proper REPL, however.

[ZackOfAllTrades]

Keywiz made me realize I know absolutely nothing about emacs.

[davidw]

I started using Emacs in 1996, and am still learning new things about it.