vindarel
> Too many concepts - too fast. Difficult to follow along. Using Emacs at this early stage is very confusing and hard to understand. Intro sections should probably use Visual Studio Code or Atom.
(about my course) (I finished the data structures chapter today)
For some, it's a feature 💪 :D
Ringtail Ringo
@amszmidt @simon_brooke @vindarel You can do basic things (as in editing text) without any configuration.
Ringtail Ringo
@simon_brooke @vindarel No, it is not user-hostile. No, there is still nothing better (have some hope for lem). No, there are no consistent bindings in other editors - even CUA differs between OS. No, nothing is as discoverable as M-x. No, theming in emacs is just on another level - modus is the only ergonomic one I know and attention to detail is not matched anywhere else.
Alfred M. Szmidt
@ringtailringo As a multiple decade user of Emacs, I agree with @simon_brooke that (GNU) Emacs is very much user hostile.
For the simple reason that it is no longer a text Editor, and has too many things to configure before you can do remotely basic things. It is also not very discoverable either.
The Lisp Machine Emacs, much simpler not as extensible as GNU Emacs, was far more user friendly.
Simon Brooke
@vindarel No, #Emacs' pathological user hostility is not a feature. Yes, forty years ago I did use Emacs for almost everything. Forty years ago, there wasn't anything better. Now, almost everything is better. Almost everything uses consistent key bindings, at least for common functions. Almost everything has easily discoverable commands. Almost everything has consistent theming.
Emacs could have moved with the times, but it hasn't.
Alfred M. Szmidt
@ringtailringo Sure, and you can do so on a PDP-8 front panel as well. Does not change the facit that Emacs is userhostile.
Ringtail Ringo
@amszmidt @simon_brooke @vindarel I see no facts, only opinions.
Alfred M. Szmidt
@ringtailringo Sorta like your trolling?
*plonk*
Simon Brooke
@amszmidt @vindarel I used #Emacs on VT100s and equivalents, and it was fine. I used Emacs under TWM, where every damned app seemed to use different bindings, and it was no worse than anything else. But by the time we got to OSF/Motif (1989) a default set of core keybindings had emerged, and almost all applications adopted it.
Leaving #Emacs as an outlier.
It did not need to be this way.
Simon Brooke
@amszmidt @ringtailringo@mastodon.social @vindarel It's also fair to say that before the Mac became established -- in the mid 1980s -- there was no reason to prefer one set of key bindings to another. But as we increasingly came to use Emacs on systems where Ctrl-C meant `copy` and Ctrl-S meant `save`, #Emacs sticking to an older set of bindings which did not conform to these (newer) conventions just become a layer of cognitive nuisance which greatly reduced its utility. >>>
Alfred M. Szmidt
@simon_brooke Indeed, and the fault of this is us old farts. I'd go utterly crazy beyond stupidity ...
But these are easily fixed technically, introduce a "scame" wrapper that tries to address these things, and in N years whenever we are dead switch it.
Simon Brooke
@amszmidt @vindarel there were indeed at the time attempts to make new key binding schemes for #Emacs to make it play nice with then-new key binding conventions, but the Emacs ecosystem was by that time so large that there were always horrible incinsistencies somewhere, so that as far as I'm aware there was never a comprehensive, consistent, key-binding scheme which was did not hopelessly violate user expectations somewhere.
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