“Last month, my skills in using GNU Emacs have improved greatly.
I’ve learned e-lisp fairly well, and I can make adjustments in
rather advanced Emacs settings. But to get to that point, I had to
read a great deal of documentation and spend a lot of time figuring
out all the things that “go without saying.”
“It demanded some sweating, but I feel this is my kind of tool.
It didn’t appeal to many of my colleagues, though. This is most
likely due to the fact that some people just don’t care about
details. They only want to keep it simple. Instead of Ctrl-X O to
change frame, they want a button click on the mouse. Instead of
Ctrl-X F to read a file into the buffer, choose file menu and click
on open. Preferably, the menus have big, multi-colored icons that
in some way represent the action.”
“My colleagues don’t care about the fact that I can tinker with
Emacs until Ctrl-X O means “open new frame, find three random
files, dump some memory to them, save them in my home directory and
then send them as email to all my relatives” for the simple reason
that they don’t need it. Fair enough — they simply don’t
care.”
“Most people who use computers don’t care how computers work
or how to use them aside from the simple tasks for which they were
put there. “I want spreadsheet to do my accounting. Why should I
ever learn how to configure network adapters, change terminal
settings, or use vi to change init scripts?” The answer to that
question is, you don’t! That’s why we have sysadmins.“