|
Strongly seconded. On the one hand, if you install a "starter kit" like Prelude and it works properly, then it might give you a little boost up the initial slope of the learning curve, but it's going to slow you down later on because you're learning how Emacs + Prelude does things rather than how Emacs does things. This becomes problematic when you try to interact with Emacs users unfamiliar with Prelude, because they don't have any knowledge of the changes Prelude makes to the environment, some of which result in incompatibilities between Emacs + Prelude and just plain Emacs. (I've run into this when answering Stack Overflow questions, to the extent that if I see a question where the asker mentions using Prelude, and it's not immediately obvious that the problem at hand could not possibly be related to Prelude's changes, I just pass on by.) On the other hand, if you install a "starter kit" like Prelude and it doesn't work properly, then you're pretty much boned, because you have no knowledge of what the misbehavior you're seeing signifies, or how to hunt it down and fix it. Not only does your editor not work right (or at all), but, because you've installed something which advertises itself as solving a newbie's every problem, you're not mentally prepared to deal with something going wrong. Worse, you've just had your initial experience with Emacs spoiled by brokenness; worse still, you aren't likely to know enough about Emacs to recognize that it's Prelude to blame, so you end up with a poor opinion of Emacs that really isn't its own fault. Just start learning Emacs. If you can figure out how to write code in the first place, learning Emacs is not all that hard, and before very long you'll wonder why you ever thought you'd need training wheels. |