Hey, #emacs crowd.

[mms@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

Hey, #emacs crowd. Do you remember what were early hurdles when trying it? You know, 37 years ago most likely.

[ross@social.rossabaker.com]

@mms Choosing between GNU Emacs and XEmacs

[sysedit@mastodon.social]

@mms Getting through the 600 pages of manual.

[howitzer105mm@pdx.social]

@mms The motion of the tidal waves and the grinding grit of the blowing sand have erased the memories of the knowledge you seek traveler. The journey you have embarked upon to meet me was in vain.

[oantolin@mathstodon.xyz]

@mms Was this is question prompted by this month's carnival? I've been thinking about it and cannot remember!

[rpluim@mastodon.social]

@mms 36 years, please! The main issue then for me was the difference between ^H and ^?

[mms@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@oantolin No, adding a webpage to my site ;-)

[benjamineskola@hachyderm.io]

@mms I first tried Emacs in 2004-05, my first year at university. I’d managed to talk my way into an account in the School of Computing’s unix labs despite being in an entirely different department, on the basis that I actually used Linux which was more than any of the actual computing students did.

The biggest hurdle back then was the relentless mockery from the SoC’s Unix admin, who was a committed vi user (emphatically not vim: just vi). I ended up switching to Vim for a while after that, but I’ve gone back and forth ever since.

[tfb@functional.cafe]

@rpluim @mms That got me, as did the Meta key. Once I got it running under X11 things got easier

[aguadopd@mastodon.social]

@mms Trying to use it on a latam Spanish keyboard (probably any non en_US standard keyboard). Ended up switching layouts.

[petes_bread_eqn_xls@mastodo.neoliber.al]

@mms I started late, I guess, in the current decade.

At first I was annoyed that CUA keyboard shortcuts didn’t work, and things had weird names (why does create new window not create a new window?)

Now I see those hurdles aren’t significant, but they were enough to make me ask myself why I was bothering with emacs when I could use TextEdit or Mousepad or nano with a TUI.

It wasn’t until I read a blog post about living in emacs that I realized it was worth the learning curve.

#emacs

[hl@social.lol]

@mms So /only/ about 8 years since I started using it regularly, but I seem to remember the biggest issues were:
- Muscle memory for copy and paste shortcuts (C-c, C-v) were very hard to adjust from, plus the kill/yank terminology was confusing.
- That C-g is normally the way to get yourself out of a confusing situation, and that seems very non-obvious.
- Mark and Point, and how to C-space to start selecting text, the idea that you weren't holding something down constantly to select text was weird.
- The naming of buffers, windows and frames. So alien.