After yesterdays post about Charles Choi’s second take on Eshell, I discovered that Choi’s post was part of a collection by Christian Tietze on a second take on various Emacs topics. Tietze himself had a post on Emacs on Second Try.
His story is not at all like mine. He first use of Emacs was under duress as part of a university course. He used it because it was required but left it behind as soon as he could. He was pretty happy using it with the text based terminals at school but once he got his first Mac he abandoned it completely.
Over the years, he learned about things like the package system and compiling from within Emacs. He was also attracted to the configurability of Emacs. He liked some of the Xah Lee’s bindings and was able to incorporate them into his Emacs configuration.
Eventually, of course, Tietze became a convert. His story and mine are alike in one respect: we both initially resisted Emacs and spent some time overcoming that resistance. And, of course, we both became committed Emacs users.
It is, really, a common story. Many of today’s zealous Emacs users took some time to adopt it. For some, like me, it took several tries before it took.