[bigstrat2003]

> It is however fully self-documented and interactive.

Unfortunately not true. I've fired up emacs once or twice, and couldn't even figure out how to save a document because it didn't show me how to do that. It might be more documented than vi (but that bar is *on the floor, vi has one of the most discovery-hostile user interfaces ever made), but it's not self-documented enough to just pick up and use with no instruction.

[SoftTalker]

I'm pretty sure that if you have an unmodified install and no .emacs that is configured otherwise, when you start emacs you are prompted with a help screen that includes instructions on using the built-in tutorial. If you do that, you'll learn the basics in about 10-15 minutes. If you skip that, yeah it's pretty different from most other software conventions.

[pkal]

And if you don't have anything configured, graphical Emacs will have a tool bar with a button to save and a menu bar that also gives the binding for the command.

GUI is different because there is no tool bar, but in Emacs 31 `xterm-mouse-mode' will be enabled by default so you can use the menu bar like a TUI.

[Narishma]

Yup. Vim is similar, except its tutorial takes more like 30 minutes.

[SoftTalker]

Yeah the entire emacs tutorial might take a long time. I don't think I ever went through it to "the end" but learning cursor movement, opening and saving files, etc. is right up front.

[ksherlock]

That's true (you can see it yourself with emacs -nw -q) and the picture is shown in the article. With a completely useless menubar.

[prmoustache]

vi is documented

Problem is most people start it the first time by providing a text file instead of firing it on its own and be greeted by the tutorial. I guess that is because they are blindly following another tutorial instead of trying to understand what they are doing.

My opinion is that "self documentation", "Getting started" pages and "tutorials" is a disease. People would actually get up to speed quicker by reading real manuals instead. They are just lured into thinking they will learn faster with tutorials because they get their first concrete results quicker but at this stage the harsh reality is thay they still usually don't know anything.

First time I used vi, I just had my operating system manual on my desk and I quickly learned to open man pages in a separate tty.

[trinix912]

VI or VIM? VI has no welcome screen. It drops you straight into a blank screen of '~' from where you just have to know to enter the insert mode, which is also not indicated anywhere unlike in VIM.

[skydhash]

There was a time when manuals was kinda big physical books. I think I have a word perfect one that is the size of a textbook. It was not about getting a result (any result) in 5 seconds. It was more about having a goal and browsing through relevant sections to learn how to do it.

[krs_]

That's a fair criticism, although once you learn how to access the documentation and where to look for/expext it I find that most things, including add-on packages and whatnot, can be learned from within Emacs itself just fine. But it does take some knowledge to get to that point in the first place for sure.

[int_19h]

One thing that greatly helped this in the DOS / early Windows era was standardizing on F1 being the key for "online help" (meaning, usually, a hyperlinked document that shipped with the product). That was basically the only thing you had to know to start learning any app.

[f1shy]

I think is not fair at all, as a default installation has a menu bar, and you can save a file in file->save. While doing so it will tell you the shortcut.

[jjav]

>it's not self-documented enough to just pick up and use with no instruction.

If they just plop you in front of a 3-d printer never having seen one and having no documentation, it'll probably take you a good while to produce something useful with it.

All good tools require training & experience.

[viraptor]

That's really not the case. I learned programming in the DOS Borland apps and did it with next to no instructions. I don't think I've ever seen the manual. Just read about the language itself. They were that easy to understand and use. Emacs is not in the same class as far as discoverable interface is concerned.

[trinix912]

The difference here is that this person has likely used text editors before and still couldn't figure this one out.

[lproven]

> couldn't even figure out how to save a document

100% this.

It is (counts on fingers) 43 years since I got my first computer of my own, and I've been using Unix-like OSes since just 6 years later in 1988... So, 37 years?

Still, even now, Emacs is this bizarre thing that teleported in from 1962 or something. Older than Unix, older than -- well, anything else still used by almost anyone except Cobol and Fortran.

I am old, starting to think about retirement, and Emacs is weird and clunky and ugly. It uses weird nonstandard names for things like "files" and "windows" and even the keys on your keyboard.

I know they are native and natural for the fans. I'm not one. I'm a fan of the great era of UI standardisation that happened at the end of the 1980s and start of the 1990s.

I wish someone would do a distro of Emacs with ErgoEmacs built in, on by default, and which could pick up the keyboard layout from the OS.

ErgoEmacs is a brave attempt to yank Emacs into the 1990s but you need to know Emacs to use it, so it's not enough.

https://ergoemacs.github.io/

[jimbokun]

VS Code is the spiritual successor to the Emacs architecture, with JavaScript instead of Elisa.

[lproven]

You mean ELisp?

[jimbokun]

Autocorrect, sigh.

[someNameIG]

I'm pretty sure the built in tutorial shows you how to save a document.

[tiberious726]

In unconfigured emacs, you can literally just go Buffer>Save in the toolbar. If you didn't know to look in the buffer menu, then you didn't read even a little bit of the tutorial that appears when you open it