[teddyh]

> Moreover it is supported out-of-the-box in emacs: `M-x list-packages`.

Or just use the menu; click on "Options” → “Manage Emacs Packages”. No need to scare people with “M-x” weirdness right out of the gate when it isn’t necessary since the option is right there in the menu.

[rodw]

Menus? Clicking? That doesn't seem very emacs-y of you. M-x weirdness - up to and including the fact that it refers to a "Meta" key not found on modern keyboards - is exactly the kind of gatekeeping that allows me to feel superior for knowing how to exit emacs gracefully.

But seriously you raise a good point. The OS-native menus in aquaemacs and similar go a long way toward making emacs more accessible and explore-able.

No joke, it is legitimately hard for a newbie to figure out how to close emacs, which is pretty ridiculous. (It's `C-x C-c` btw, but I honestly don't know how a first-time user could figure that out on their own without a menu. You need to be _told_. It's absolutely crazy that you need to consult the manual to know how it exit the program.)

EDIT: It looks like this thread is too deep for me to post a genuine reply, but just to respond to the "it's just plain emacs too" comment. Good point, and I was aware of that but I didn't know what to call the plain-vanilla Windowed/GUI-enabled emacs. I guess it's just "emacs". I actually hesitated on naming aquaemacs for exactly this reason, which is why I hedged with "or similiar".

[teddyh]

To be clear, I’m not talking about the menus in some special Emacs port like aquamacs, I mean the regular Emacs, with its menu bar, seen here: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

[NoGravitas]

I think it actually helps to present M-x to new people as being the "command palette" for Emacs. A modern starting Emacs setup should have a vertical completion setup and fuzzy matching, so hitting M-x and a few keys gives you a list of matching commands with their documentation next to them.