[distantsounds]

so let me get this straight:

- read the manual - follow the tutorial - customize it to your liking

wow, what enlightening advice! this must be unique to emacs and not _any_other piece of software!

once again, all you need to get FP'd on hackernews is to put the word "emacs" in your title. zoom! to the front page!

[drothlis]

I suspect it's because so many Emacs tutorials out there cover the same material as the built-in tutorial. And so many pre-packaged Emacs configuration files disable the menu-bar for no good reason other than that's what everyone else seems to be doing.

e.g. "Emacs Prelude", one such configuration or "distribution" of Emacs, used to disable the menu-bar by default as recently as a year ago: https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude/commit/878cffb

[bananamerica]

Acessing manual, documentation, values, functions, and source code on Emacs is so easy that it would be hard to summarize all the ways you can do it. It's an integral part of your workflow, and literally unlike anything else. Unlike other programs, that really can and should be an integral part of your daily routine.

One thing I dislike about the manual is that it rarely presents examples, but commands like describe-variable and describe-function often help elucidate usage. Not to mention external packages that makes all that even easier.

[alpaca128]

It would be great if every other software had documentation comparable to Emacs', but that's simply not the case.

[fabianmg]

We have found the vim user...