Re: Emacs learning curve

[Óscar Fuentes]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

[snip]

> People who can't be bothered to think about keybindings can't likely be
> bothered to think about programming.

This is so wrong.

Have you ever re-trained your muscle memory for something you do 500
times a day while being concentrated on a higher level task? That every
time it goes wrong your concentration suffers and hence is irritating as
hell? Can you think of the level of motivation required for suffering
that pain for days, maybe weeks, until you are accustomed to the new
keybindings?

Emacs' idiosyncratic keybindings are, without doubt, the higher entry
barrier nowadays. Maybe it wasn't so 15 years ago, when people assumed
that every application had different keybindings for the same trivial
chores, but those times are long gone. The least thing Emacs can do is
to advertise with big letters on the welcome screen something like:

IF YOU ARE NEW TO EMACS, CLICK HERE IF YOU WANT TO USE KEYBINDINGS WICH
CONFORMS ARE MORE FAMILIAR TO YOU.

and figure out how to display the correct keybindings on the
documentation when the user has cua-mode activated.

[snip]