[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.

[skydhash]

I get you. Emacs is one software that you must invest some time to get the famous ROI. The promise is one unified interface for all the tools you may need (editor, tasks runner, shell, spellchecking, file manager,...). But the learning curve is there, although not as steep as some would make it appear.

One of my major motivation for putting in the time is that Emacs is very stable. You can coast for decades on a configuration. I don't mind learning new stuff, but it's grating to for it to be taken away, especially if there's no recourse (proprietary software).

[marssaxman]

Well, that's ironic. I actually do spend all day, every work day, in a piece of software which unifies most of the tools I need - editor, file manager, make console, find/grep frontend, etc. It's as stable as can be, since I'm the only person who maintains or even uses it, and it's as simple as can be, since I don't bother to write features in unless I really want them.

I've always supposed that emacs was for people with inscrutably complex text-editing needs, far beyond the bounds of my "nano is plenty" imagination, but if my cozy little coding environment is the kind of thing people are doing with emacs, I can understand why they would like that.