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#emacs
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2021-10-01
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sova-soars-the-sora04:10:00

the documentation for how to use emacs is an unending source of irritation 😄

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sova-soars-the-sora04:10:58

And when asking very straightforward questions someone links me to documentation pages instead of just telling me the actual command to use -> internal screaming volume max.

pavlosmelissinos06:10:29

That hasn't been my experience but I'm lucky enough to have people in my team that have been using emacs for far longer than I have. Can you share a recent example of something that you struggled with? Maybe you're missing a part of the puzzle (I've been there, especially before I discovered stuff like describe-function , describe-key, org-insert-structure-template ).

anonimitoraf07:10:25

Yea I think that's how I initially thought too. After writing 2-3 (small) emacs packages, I feel like it's actually quite intuitive to do what I need to do

David Vujic07:10:03

I learned most of the basic stuff from the excellent book Clojure for the Brave and True, and this chapter about Emacs with clojure https://www.braveclojure.com/basic-emacs/

David Vujic07:10:35

The config in the brave-repo is a bit outdated though. 👋 if you want some ideas on how to configure emacs

respatialized15:10:11

my biggest pet peeve about emacs-related docs or Q&A is when the default keybindings for a function are listed without the according function name. I don't want a pointer storing the location of the answer on someone else's system, I want the answer!

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sova-soars-the-sora04:10:15

</unpopular opinions>

solf13:10:03

I’ve used emacs for 10 years now, I’ve never been able to RTFM from A to Z, like people have told me to do in the past

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vemv08:10:03

that was pretty dubious advice anyway, the Emacsy way is querying doc interactively as you go

solf13:10:14

it’s just… a lot. And having your expectations challenged every 5 minutes (because emacs and emacs-lisp predates a lot of “modern” designs) is tiring