[layer8]

To navigate a Turbo-Vision-style IDE and explore its functionality, you basically only need to know how the Alt and Tab keys work (okay, and Return and Esc and arrow keys), as alluded to in TFA. Emacs doesn’t quite have that base level of operating uniformity I think.

[JoelMcCracken]

To navigate emacs, you really only need to know ctrl, alt, and the basic norms of keyboard usage (return for newline/accept, shift for capitals)

Really, compared to what I see here, the chief difficulty with emacs is the sheer volume of possible commands, and the heterogeneity of their names and patterns, which I believe is all a result of its development history. But the basics are just as you describe.

[layer8]

It’s a good question to what complexity (volume) the approach scales, but dialog boxes can get you quite far, and menus are fundamentally “just” a tree like keyboard shortcuts are.

Emacs has Elisp commands first, then keyboard shortcuts for them, then maybe (not as a rule) menu items, and rarely dialog boxes. The Turbo Vision approach, from its design philosophy, has menus and dialogs first, then keyboard shortcuts for them.

One approach isn’t strictly better than the other, nor are they mutually exclusive. Ideally you’d always have both. My disagreement is with the “I think Emacs still does all of this” above. Emacs is substantially different in its emphasis, presentation, and its use of dialogs.

[JoelMcCracken]

Yeah that’s fair. In many ways the spacemacs/doom model is more akin to what you describe, with a lot of caveats; it’s not a total rework of all key bindings. In emacs novice affordances are usually an afterthought, not part of the core design and community norms.

Of course, I must say there is a trade off here: you can design for novices or for advanced users, but very often not both.

[skydhash]

The base input of emacs is ‘M-x’. From there, any command is accessible. And you have ‘M-:’ for evaluating any bit of elisp code. There’s a few UI concepts to learn (frame, window, buffers, point, mark, region,…), but that would fit in a single sheet of paper.

[layer8]

The keys I enumerated are sufficient to discover and execute all available operations in that style of TUI. You don’t have to type commands or command-specific keyboard shortcuts, like you have to in Emacs. It’s analogous to how in a traditional GUI you can discover and execute everything just using the mouse.

Like in the GUI analogy, you can then choose to remember and use the displayed keyboard shortcuts for frequently used operations, but you don’t have to.

[skydhash]

It’s easy when you have a small amount of commands. And distributions like Doom Emacs is fairly discoverable too. But emacs have a lot of commands and while it offers menus, it’s only the surface level of what’s available.

[JoelMcCracken]

For most fundamental operations there are menus available. Most heavy emacs users opt to turn them off however.

You can even see the menu atop the screen shot in the article, with the familiar names etc.

[marssaxman]

It's possible I might once have given emacs a try, if the way people talk about it did not sound like such baffling moon-language: when I encounter stuff like "so I C-x C-f’d into my init.el, M-x eval-buffer’d, then C-c C-c’d an org-babel block before C-x k’ing the scratch buffer" I just want to back away slowly and leave them to it, whatever it is they're doing. Y'all have fun with your C-r X-wing mork-butterfly porg fluffers, I'm going to edit some code over here, using a text editor, that edits text files.

[skydhash]

So you don’t ‘git clone’ and ‘git commit’, or ‘mkdir’ and ‘grep’?

[marssaxman]

Not following you; how does that question relate?

[skydhash]

All the keybindings you mentioned are commands accessible with M-x. The thing with Emacs is that a chord is always attached to a keymap. The global keymap is always accessible while all the others are accessible through a keybind in another keymap, recursively.

So the only thing you need to know are those commands. And that's the main appeal of Emacs, to have commands that augment text editing. One of the most powerful examples is org mode, which is just another markup language, but there's a lot of commands that makes it an organizer, a time tracker, an authoring platform, a code notebook.

Each mode is a layer of productivity you put on the bare editing experience.

[marssaxman]

Thank you for your helpful reply. I'm afraid I don't have enough familiarity with emacs to quite follow your explanation - I didn't actually write the bit of emacs-speak in my previous message, and I don't know what its terms mean. I just asked ChatGPT to invent something one emacs user might plausibly say to another!

It has always sounded like emacs is extraordinarily powerful and configurable, and that must be great for people who want to do extraordinary things with their text editor. There was a time when I enjoyed tinkering with my environment more, but these days I prefer simple, ordinary tools I can easily understand. I don't really want to think about the tools at all, but focus on the task I'm doing with them. I'm content to let emacs be something other people appreciate.