Emacs is most definitely not a rocket science. The problem with people trying Emacs is that they approach it just like any other text editor, instead of understanding the grand, core principle of it - Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter with a built-in text editor and not the other way around. Therefore it makes much better sense if you approach it from a Lisp perspective. Alas, many, perhaps most, beginners try it after hearing how "powerful this Emacs thingy is", and try to learn "editor features", instead of focusing on the Lisp side of things. Some even admit that they don't like Lisp and don't understand it and plan to never deal with it. Most posts of "abandonment" and "I switch to VSCode after decades of Emacs use", after closer examination, reveal that the person perhaps never even written any elisp code - at most, they'd just [almost] blindly copy&paste existing snippets into their configs.
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Emacs is most definitely not a rocket science. The problem with people trying Emacs is that they approach it just like any other text editor, instead of understanding the grand, core principle of it - Emacs is first and foremost a Lisp interpreter with a built-in text editor and not the other way around. Therefore it makes much better sense if you approach it from a Lisp perspective. Alas, many, perhaps most, beginners try it after hearing how "powerful this Emacs thingy is", and try to learn "editor features", instead of focusing on the Lisp side of things. Some even admit that they don't like Lisp and don't understand it and plan to never deal with it. Most posts of "abandonment" and "I switch to VSCode after decades of Emacs use", after closer examination, reveal that the person perhaps never even written any elisp code - at most, they'd just [almost] blindly copy&paste existing snippets into their configs.