Mahmoud Mazouz is an Emacs n00b. He’s been using Emacs for about two months but has experience with (neo)Vim and VS Code. He recently posted his view of Emacs and what he sees as its strengths.
Like many (or, perhaps, most) of us, he finds the chief benefit to be Emacs’ extensibility. Unlike many folks, Mazouz is happy enough with Emacs functionality; it’s the look and feel that he was unhappy with.
That’s a common complaint—especially among n00bs—but instead of taking to Twitter to complain about it, Mazouz decided to fix the UI/UX to suit his needs. He found it reasonably easy. Rather than use someone else’s theme, he built is own. Similarly, he tried several keybinding schemes before settling on Meow.
He also didn’t like the mode line but found that it was too complex for him to fix. Fortunately, he liked the Doom modeline, which is available as a standalone package on MELPA, and is happy with that.
One of the themes of the post is that it’s possible to do a lot of Emacs customization even if you aren’t experienced in Elisp. Most of the functionality that you want that doesn’t come with stock Emacs is available as packages. Mazouz mentions Org-mode (although that’s arguably a stock feature now) and Magit. Pretty much any functionality you might need is available as a package.
There’s nothing surprising in Mazouz’s post for experienced Emacs users but I like the way he fixed the UI/UX to suit himself. Worth a read if you also like such stories.