Is Emacs Intimidating for Beginners?

¶Is Emacs hard / intimidating to learn?

Let’s discuss the various barriers to learning Emacs. I want to hear from all of you on this topic!

DISCLAIMER: The content below is a set of experiences viewers shared while discussing this topic on stream. All of the things stated below are opinions and not meant to be taken as fact! The goal was to gather information on the various ways people have trouble learning Emacs so that educational gaps might be filled both by Emacs’ documentation and the community.

¶What were the things that made Emacs hard to learn or get started?

Scary for the first few days at least, don’t know where to start
Remembering keyboard shortcuts, especially if English is a second language
Lack of stable basis for configurations, i.e. a good starting point as opposed to nothing
The user manual is “garbage”
Learning a new programming language for configuration (Emacs Lisp)
Concerns about RSI from the key bindings
Figuring out your key binding strategy for customization
Not knowing how to do certain operations because things are named differently or have nonstandard key bindings
Takes a long time to get comfortable and experienced with making your own configuration
Community packages can be hard to learn due to documentation, etc
The Emacs interaction model isn’t clear from the beginning
Being told to RTFM when asking legitimate questions
Not enough content to get started with Emacs Lisp, difficult to grasp at first
Key bindings are too complex, too many keystrokes
If you’re familiar with vim, evil-mode isn’t really compatible enough
Antiquated/arcane default configuration (probably from terminal days)
Emacs sometimes can feel less responsive than other editors
Knowing that it will be a time sink
Many community packages that do similar things, hard to know which one to use, decision fatigue, motivation killer
Hard to start using it at work because it takes a lot of time to set up a config to be productive, especially compared to other IDEs
Knowing how to get better performance out of Emacs
Finding content for learning
Major and minor modes are hard to understand at first
Not enough interactive learning tools

¶What’s the one thing someone could have told you to save you a lot of time and/or trouble?

Basic navigation guide on the keybindings
How to organize config files when starting your first init.el
Specific resources like Mastering Emacs
That there is a built-in tutorial
A better initial overview of Emacs Lisp, including things like quoting
How to easily find documentation for concepts, especially describe-function describe-variable, describe-key, the manual, etc
Understanding the general Emacs window management workflow
How to configure some of the more powerful packages like Projectile, Helm/Ivy, etc
Explaining the unfamiliar Emacs terminology
Install which-key
Encouragement and instruction to get more comfortable with Emacs Lisp for configuration
Knowing that you can chain keybindings by holding Ctrl, etc, and also that Emacs will wait for the next key in a sequence
Focus more on aliens concepts first, keybindings second
Encouragement that Emacs isn’t too old to use
Dispel the myth that Emacs will cause RSI (change config, key mappings, etc)
Understanding commands and M-x from the beginning

¶My own experience

I’ve come in contact with Emacs a few times over the years before I really started to learn and understand it.

University
Lisp in a Box
Trying again, learning about customization
Really investing in making Emacs a full environment

¶What made you stick with Emacs?

Despite the difficulty, what was it that made you keep trying to learn it?