Emacs, how it all started (for me)

A bit of advice to people that have the urge to try Emacs.

Do not use a distribution. Yes I know.. you have read that before and then you used Doom or Spacemacs anyways. That's me in the past. And it never worked out for me. I always ended up trying to configure things and the whole setup was too complex for me, so I failed.

Over the last 10 years I have been a heavy (n)vim user but I tried Emacs multiple times. Always a distro. It never worked out. Now over the last year I was trying Emacs with a vanilla setup and configured everything from scratch. With the AIs this is super simple because they can help you get out of config trouble.

The experience was way better than before. After my one year experience I have switched back to neovim but I still have become a fan of Emacs and I have adapted my nvim config. Stuff like dired, magit, compile-mode I have found equivalent nvim plugins and use them now.

It was always like that before about 10 years ago. You're getting your feet wet in programming, learning about free alternatives, and you learn that all the world's legendary hackers become proficient in one of either vi (vim) or Emacs. So you dig in and you find that, as your awareness of programming languages grows, Emacs is a "good-enough" solution for working in nearly all of them. (Vim is too, but maybe a bit less so in 1995 when I was starting out.) And if you want to program effectively cross-language, there's nothing you can do but lock the fuck in and learn your editor's idiosyncrasies, shortcuts, and programming/customization features.

These days we're all spoiled by Visual Studio Code, Zed, even things like Geany and Notepad++. So it makes less sense for neophytes to start with something as ancient and idiosyncratic as Emacs, and Emacs does not enjoy nearly the prominence or mindshare it had decades ago. (Though I understand its absolute user base has grown.)

I moved to nvim from vim and it's seems me to easy and handy for everyday use. While emacs like rocket since :D

I've been trying emacs for a while. People keep saying it's self-discovering and I have no idea what they mean. Am I missing part of the manual? I google stuff when I don't understand, like any other piece of software. I've never managed to successfully use the help system to find anything.