this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Why the journey of learning Emacs and Elisp in 2023 is so hard ? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by SuLinab@alien.top to c/emacs
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Hey there.

I'm a fan of Emacs, like you folks.

I use Emacs org every day, mainly for my teaching class. Furthermore, I learn Emacs for three years ago.

But I struggle to achieve my learning of Elisp. For example, taping lisp and elisp code with evil/lispy is a true nightmare (I use Prelude with few modes, btw), not to mention when I type code block within org.

I knew the learning curve is hard. But I didn't expect that much frustration to learn it. The documentation is austere. So few examples are given. There is too little blogs or books about Emacs, specifically about org and babel.

To illustrate my point, let's take the «*this*» kind-of macro in babel, that I found TODAY by CHANCE in this page : https://orgmode.org/manual/Results-of-Evaluation.html.

It's a game changer for a lot of my code, and would deserve a whole page to illustrate it. But no, it's given in a «niche» example.

Don't be mistaken, I found Babel/Org/Emacs wonderful, but what a pain in the ass to learn it !

For such an old and wise piece of software, I can't understand why we don't have a smooth learning experience with Emacs. A lot of people could benefit Org/Emacs, without the big hinder of the «lack» of documentation (mostly examples).

Am I the only one to experience this ?

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[–] sg2002@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

If you have the right mindset learning Emacs can be way more enjoyable than learning any other tool.

It's just that the mindset required is the old school pre-Internet programmer mindset. You need to make a habbit of internalizing the documentation. When you're doing something, look into the appropriate section of the manual, to see if you really know all the manual has to say regarding the subject. You also need to track which portions of the manuals you've learned and which you haven't. Also, yes, learn to efficiently use info. It takes an hour, but would serve you well for years.

After you've established those habbits, you'd understand the superiority of the Emacs way, because you'd be learning topics in a systematic manner, instead of just learning a hodgepodge of random hacks from Stack Overflow, reddit and other sources.