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 11 months ago by SuLinab@alien.top to c/emacs@communick.news
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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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[–] SuLinab@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Thanks a lot for your response.

I will consider leaving prelude away, and dive into my own Emacs configuration. I am afraid of the time-consuming experience that it will be, but I hope it's worth it (and seeing the responses here, I definitely think it is).

[–] geza42@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I think one has to be pragmatic, and only put effort to features that are actually useful. Don't put hours writing an elisp function which only saves you 10 seconds in a month. I'm saying this, because I had to stop myself from spending time on Emacs. I realized that my config is OK for me. I still have a lot of ideas how to make it better, but I simply don't do them, because it doesn't matter too much. Of course, I still do smaller tweaks, but otherwise I spend my time on more useful things. If someone had told me this before I started using emacs, they would have saved several days of not-too-useful emacs configuration for me. Of course, it was fun, I did it as a hobby, but still, it wasn't the smartest way to spend my free time.

[–] timmymayes@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Learning emacs via the emacs for scratch setup drive me into learning elisp. I'm no guru but it did set me up with a really solid foundation.