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Re: Emacs learning curve


From: Noah Lavine
Subject: Re: Emacs learning curve
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2010 15:12:51 -0400

Everyone's experience could potentially be different, of course, but I am someone who started learning Emacs recently, and perhaps you would like to hear the things I found difficult.

The big issue, I think, is discovering what Emacs can do. I know that Emacs is *potentially* extremely powerful, but I don't know enough to make use of this power. The Emacs Starter Kit showed me some things, and I found a few more through different web pages, but I think I still don't know very much. I don't know where I would find Emacs features that are useful for me.

One issue is that a lot of good Elisp code is scattered around the internet, and it's hard to find. The future integration of package.el should help with that a lot. (Although the package.el interface still needs better descriptions of what packages do.)

Another issue is that there are a lot of commands to learn. Perhaps one solution would be to emphasize more general functions over specific ones. For instance, you don't need isearch-forward when you've got isearch-forward-regexp.

Finally, it would be interesting to compare the experiences of different Emacs newbies like myself to see if there are similarities, but that could be quite a project.

I hope these things help
Noah Lavine

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