In celebration of this month’s Emacs Carnival, Christian Tietze has a post on his mistaken beliefs about Emacs. His “mistakes” were not about his using Emacs in the wrong way. They concerned his mistaken beliefs about Emacs.
His first mistaken notion was that Emacs is old and clumsy. We see this all the time. It’s certainly true that Emacs is old in the sense of having been around for more than 40 years but it’s not old in the way people who say that mean. Emacs is, in fact, a modern editor that offers technology that others are still trying to get working. The canonical examples are Org mode and Magit but there are others.
As for clumsy, n00bies find it that way the same way beginning bicycle riders find bikes clumsy. Once they learn to use it correctly it seems natural and they don’t have to think about how to use it.
His second incorrect idea involves text. He believed that text was not enough and that you needed fancy formatting of your input text. Actually, of course, Emacs’ almost exclusive use of straight text is one of its superpowers. Irreal and just about every other Emacs commenter has made this point repeatedly and discussed it in depth.
The rest of his misconceptions involved what you can do with Emacs. At first he thought he would use it just for to-dos—presumably with Org—and that he would build his configuration by copying and pasting bits of Elisp that he found elsewhere.
Experienced Emacers learn that Emacs will eventually try to swallow every task you do on your computer and that your init.el is a black hole that will suck up any mental cycles that venture close to its event horizon.
Tietze’s misconceptions are common but fortunately every user who sticks with Emacs comes to recognize them for the mistakes that they are.