After learning the key bindings, I actually found a library book on a pre-CLisp dialect of lisp by some finnish authors and wrote a tool i later used to write my thesis in electrical engineering.
The tool was parsing my matlab files and generated latex, which i then made into the final pdf, complete with formulaes and calculations.
So instead of writing a decent thesis, i learned about makefiles, latex, emacs lisp and the fact that parsers are very interesting.
Also, Lisp felt sooooooo out of this world after pascal, C, Cpp.
Surely, i did not work a single day as an electric engineer.
GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. In other words, it does a neophyte no good to see the matrix without having lived in it first. It's all one can manage learning emacs's editing primitives if you've never seen it before. Reminding them some (but not all!) of these primitives are in fact elisp expressions is just annoying.
I have not forgotten my own "beginner's journey" - au contraire - I vividly remember it, and thus I'm sharing an admonition - so people wouldn't waste their time. Because I did. Besides, I have successfully mentored people from zero-to-hero and helped them learn Emacs.
My suggestion to focus on Elisp is not like tech-splaining monads, and Lisp is not that difficult. Definitely not even in the same league of difficulty as Haskell. It is an astoundingly simple language. And yet people just ignore it for years, clueless of what they're missing.
I'd typically would start by showcasing a single (albeit enormously important) aspect of it, like search. When someone sees the countless ways to search for things in Emacs:
That typically, already is enough for them to say - "darn, I want this...". Then next step is to show them that there's nothing to fear - everything is documented, described and can be inspected on the go.
In teams where pair-programming is a normal practice, I would typically watch their efforts with something in VSCode, IntelliJ, or even Vim and ask them if they'd want to see how I'd do the same/similar thing in Emacs. If the person is not interested, I won't push for it, but at that point, someone who worked with me on the same team knows that I can show them something entertaining and interesting to see, even if they don't get the immediate urge to dive into it.
I did - I first came to emacs during my lisp phase. I didn't stay with lisp, but I did stay with functional programming, and in those days emacs was the best environment for a number of functional programming languages (maybe still is).
GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. GGP's critique is typical of poor exposition. Read the first chapter of any maths textbook from the 1970s. It doesn't make any sense because the author already knows where everything leads and lest he appear a fool to his peers, will insist the reader does too.
And that's why it cost me two-three years of wasted experience. Looking back, I wish I had focused more on understanding Elisp, learning edebug and the built-in profiler. My bona fide Emacs journey began only after I started writing Elisp without fear.
I guess if one's hobby is fiddling with emacs, then I could see why learning edebug and the profiler are valuable first steps. But I view emacs as merely a tool to get vastly more important work done. I just want it to stay out of my way.
I have been using emacs for 20 years and never heard of edebug before today, and have never used the profiler. If I install some new package and it doesn't immediately work, I usually uninstall it right away. I don't have time to fuck around. I would rather chew glass than debug breaking changes in my init.el so I make changes rarely, and deliberately. To each their own, I suppose.
So, you're making assumptions even without ever trying? You just decided it's hard/time consuming/worthless even though you have "never heard" about it?
> I have been using emacs for 20 years
Yeah, well. Like I said: Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter, "using Emacs" actually means dealing with Lisp. To what extent - it's everyone's own choice. I have seen too many stories of people like you - "using" it for decades and then abandoning it for VSCode or other things, without even realizing what they've given up.
It only takes just a bit of knowing the basics of Elisp to get the genuine Emacs experience, otherwise, you're just riding the car, not driving it.
> I don't have time to fuck around
That is a big misconception. Prolific Emacs users don't waste time ricing their setup just for the sake of it. They apply Lisp to meet their needs. My own work demands certain changes every single day - I have to move between different projects, in different PLs, dissimilar teams; I poke into various APIs; consume data in all sorts of formats; build prototypes, every time with different scope and requirements; analyze huge sets of data; search through documents, hop between different hosts, etc. I can only imagine how miserable my life would've been without my Lisp tools, where Emacs invariably takes the center stage.
It seems like you lack the notion of what it's like to literally shape your tools for your needs as they evolve. It's like having an entire pottery workshop at your disposal, but choosing to only pick up the already finished, dried pieces. Seriously, don't be daft - hook up an AI assistant to your config, the possibilities are virtually endless. It could be just about anything - any small annoyance that you may decide to improve in your workflow. I wish I had developed this "emacs/hacker mindset" where I don't even think twice, if something feels suboptimal - I'd try to automate it. I'd just start typing some Elisp in my scratch buffer. These days, it has gotten even simpler than that - I'd just type a prompt.
>You just decided it's hard/time consuming/worthless even though you have "never heard" about it?
You must mave misread what I wrote, because you're conflating two different statements.
>I have to move between different projects, in different PLs, dissimilar teams; I poke into various APIs; consume data in all sorts of formats
None of this requires elisp beyond the use-package incantations to install a given mode, which is only done a single time.
>It seems like you lack the notion of what it's like to literally shape your tools for your needs as they evolve.
My needs are already mostly satisfied by emacs. It is excellent at editing and composing text out of the box already. I have language servers for auto-completion. I have syntax highlighting. If I am mangling a text file I use the build in transient macro recording feature.
The editor itself is almost never the bottleneck in my work. Elisp is so unpleasant that I have zero desire to hack around in it for fun.
You just sit here stiff-necked without even the slightest clue of what I'm talking about. I don't hack for "fun", I hack with a purpose. Here's a practical anecdote. I was pair programming with Matthew over Zoom and he was showing me certain things. He would navigate to different sites, switch between terminal and his editor, run some scripts etc. I just couldn't bear interrupting him all the time saying, "hey, hey, hey, slow down, please. I'm trying to take notes here... Hey, can you share this link?...", etc. So that bothered me for a minute. I sacrificed my lunch break, sat down and figured that out. I wrote a tiny function that checks if the last thing in the clipboard is an image and sends it to tesseract CLI for OCRing. Took me not even fifteen minutes. Now I can just select an area of my screen (with Flameshot), and the text pops into an Emacs buffer.
This feature never existed - not in a package, not in anyone's config on GitHub. It's a specific problem that I quickly solved for my own needs. Could I have done this with Python, Bash, or AWK? Sure, why not? The thing is - before Emacs distilled this mindset into me, I wouldn't even have bothered about it. It wouldn't be a bottleneck I would ever think of noticing. And that is just a single example of hundreds of different things Emacs helps me with. Anything text-related invariably ends up being routed through Emacs, and majority of programmers have little idea how empowering this could be. I consume much of the content through Emacs - I read HN threads in Emacs. Also Slack, Reddit, Jira, my browser history and other things. This very comment is being typed in Emacs.
I have seen both of these worlds. You are sharing just one side of it, of which I am very familiar. So why don't you take my word for it and give it a try, instead of arguing that the side (you have never even experienced) is not worth your attention? What do you have to lose anyway?
>So why don't you take my word for it and give it a try, instead of arguing that the side (you have never even experienced) is not worth your attention?
Because you're being too aggressive and unpleasant
After learning the key bindings, I actually found a library book on a pre-CLisp dialect of lisp by some finnish authors and wrote a tool i later used to write my thesis in electrical engineering.
The tool was parsing my matlab files and generated latex, which i then made into the final pdf, complete with formulaes and calculations.
So instead of writing a decent thesis, i learned about makefiles, latex, emacs lisp and the fact that parsers are very interesting.
Also, Lisp felt sooooooo out of this world after pascal, C, Cpp.
Surely, i did not work a single day as an electric engineer.
PS I keep looking for this book to this very day