I’m only very early into my learning emacs journey and, from my lowly viewpoint at the foothills before the mountain that I still hope to summit, the stages of learning Emacs seem to start with:

  • Bewilderment (wtf?)
  • Frustration (wth?)
  • Shock (it can’t really be this bad can it?)
  • Anger (wtf?)

I guessing that Denial is somewhere up ahead followed some, maybe long, time later by Enlightment and, finally, Nirvana.

In the interest of faithfully documenting my experience while it is still fresh, these are the biggest pain points I’ve experienced:

  • The default Emacs keybindings are horrific.
  • Evil Mode keybindings work fine for document editing but:
    • Aren’t consistently available or applied throughout the rest of the UI, and
    • Aren’t compatible with the tutorial.
  • The separation of windows and buffers as concepts:
    • Stuff I’m working on keeps disappearing as the content of my window is replaced by a different buffer.
    • I just want every file / buffer to open in something like a new tab. Closing the window / tab should close the file.
  • Semi-regularly I press something or do something and I can’t enter anything anymore, not even the key sequences to quit Emacs. I don’t know if it’s just ignorance about what I’ve done or some misbehaving package but I have to force close Emacs and start all over again.