[tom_]

One tip I read somewhere (possibly from Steve Yegge?) was that it's a good idea to disable the Emacs menu bar - and I agree. The Emacs menu bar is this kind of weird uncanny valley thing. It looks like a normal menu bar, but any time you click one of the items on it, you'll find that you're doing something that actually only makes sense if you're into Emacs already. It won't help you when you're starting out, and once you're up and running you won't need it (but you can ctrl+right click on the buffer to get if you ever feel like you do...) - and, meanwhile, it's taking up space on the screen that you could use for more lines of text.

(macOS users are stuck with the menu bar generally, and that means they're stuck with the Emacs menu bar too. Just ignore it.)

While you're there, get rid of the scroll bars too. They never work properly, and this way you get an extra column or two of text per window.

[tmtvl]

The Edit menu has undo, cut, copy, and paste. Is that stuff that only makes sense if you're into Emacs already? The Help menu has the tutorial and the manual. Same question. The File menu has open file, save, save as, close, and quit. If you open a file which uses a mode which has options you get a menu showing those options.

I don't think the discoverability of all those things is worth giving up in exchange for 1 more line of text, but of course everyone is different and that makes the world such an interesting place.

[tom_]

Hmm, good question. I had another go, for the first time in years, albeit with experienced Emacs eyes now, so I know roughly what's going on. Still felt like every click just gave me More Emacs Shit, which I remember being the main confusing thing.

Almost none of the options bring up a friendly GUI dialog of the sort you might be accustomed to; you're most likely just plonked back in the Emacs frame, possibly in some new window that opened in some random place, that doesn't seem to work quite like anything you've ever seen before, or possibly in the minibuffer, ditto, plus its own set of additional confusing aspects.

So perhaps the suggestion to just dispense with it entirely (along with the toolbar, which I forgot to mention...) was just the thing that got me over this initial notch in the difficulty curve, the bit where I just needed to give up and accept that Emacs was going to be one of those things that was absolutely not like anything else.

(You're not wrong about the discoverability though. I've been using Emacs for 20 years now and I did find a couple of interesting-looking things.)