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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  • karthinkBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I found Babel/Org/Emacs wonderful, but what a pain in the ass to learn it !

    These are four different things (along with Elisp), are you trying to learn them all together? This is a recipe for frustration and burnout. You can learn Emacs bottom up (starting with Elisp) or top down (Starting with Org, then Emacs). Pick an approach and stick to it.

    The documentation is austere

    This makes no sense – Emacs’ documentation is among the best for projects of its kind. The Emacs manual, Elisp manual, EINTR manual and Org manual have answered almost every question I’ve had, with very few exceptions.

    So few examples are given.

    The entirety of Emacs’ source is open to you, and that’s without including every package you have installed. Every usage of a macro or function is an example. xref-find-references is your friend.

    There is too little blogs or books about Emacs, specifically about org and babel.

    This may require a change in mindset. The reason I need books or blog posts to learn (say) Zig or Nix is because the manuals are out of date or publicly available source is unreadably dense. For the above given reasons, this is not true of Emacs.

    The only time I’ve needed blog posts to learn about Emacs is for discovery – bringing attention to the existence of a feature is something Emacs does struggle with, despite the introduction of new commands like shortdoc. Even then, I prefer to just look up the source or the manual to learn about a feature once I know it exists.

    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.

    *this* is only useful for post-processing babel blocks (as I understand it), and it is mentioned in the section on post-processing babel blocks. It is explained with examples too. I don’t see where else it should go.

    For such an old and wise piece of software, I can’t understand why we don’t have a smooth learning experience with Emacs.

    Your idea of a smooth learning curve comes baked in with assumptions I don’t share. The manuals can teach you everything you need to know to beat Emacs into the shape you want. I’ve had a much smoother time learning Emacs than I’ve had learning any other complex piece of software, like Bash, Systemd, Blender or (heaven forbid) Nix.