Tuhdo asks a question on the Emacs reddit: How many years have you been using Emacs? On the one hand it seems like the answer should be “who cares?” but I found the answers revealing. Those answers ranged from “about a week” to “over 40 years.” One thing for sure, my 15 or 16 years puts me right in the neophyte range.
The thing about the answers is that no one said, “I’ve been using it for X years so I’m an expert.” Even folks with 40 years of experience acknowledge that they’re still
learning the mysteries of Emacs. One guy said said, “I’m a newbie, I started in 93.” Someone else replied to that, “Same for me. I graduated from college in 1983 and started using Emacs a couple of years before that.”
I really like the humble attitude of long-time Emacs users. Even if they’ve been using it for 40 years or more, they still describe themselves as “newbies”. This fact should give pause to those who whine that Emacs has a steep learning curve and is just too hard to bother with. Yes, you won’t learn everything there is to know in a couple of weeks or a couple of decades but the journey is rewarding and after a fairly short time you will be outediting those posers using the latest blingware.