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 10 months 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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[–] BackToPlebbit69@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago

Learn enough to figure out how to use "Use Package" and figure out what packages you like, and what you truly hate about Emacs so you can customize the fuck out of it and BTFO the shitty defaults.

Store your config in GitHub and use GNU Stow to deploy it on each of your machines.

Past that, the only truly fucking "hard" thing is LSP for Emacs for use within modern web dev settings.

The minute that someone makes a config that is as easy as an IDE for React and Typescript projects, then I am convinced Emacs is easy to use so I will agree with your frustration that it is pretty crazy that it has not kept up with other IDEs in this respect.

Otherwise, it's pretty good for Org mode and terminal. That is about all I use my actual old config for.

Spacemacs has gotten me closer to what I want though, but I just wish it was 100x easier with zero effort to get shit working like an IDE.

Maybe Doom is better though. Haven't touched that in ages either.