Back when I was still a Vim user, I would occasionally try Emacs because of its nice features. It never stuck—until it did—because some of its behavior seemed too alien. The most prominent example of that was the scrolling. By default, Emacs has a sadistic scrolling mode where the screen will suddenly scroll up when the point got a certain distance from the bottom of the window. I found it very jarring and usually abandoned my Emacs adventure shortly after it started. I can see how, in a theoretical sense, you can make the case that the default behavior is the right thing but I can’t believe anyone actually likes it1.
Of course, I was a n00b then and didn’t understand that with Emacs you can have it your way. A little Googling and I discovered that it’s easy to stop that scrolling behavior. I did that 10 years ago and really haven’t thought about scrolling since.
Now Clemens Radermacher over at (with-emacs has his own issues with scrolling and wrote a bit of Elisp to get scrolling the way he likes it. His solution scrolls the screen by half a page each time he calls his code and highlights the line the point is on for a short time. There’s an animated GIF in his post so you can see what the result looks like.
If you’re dissatisfied with Emacs’ scrolling, take a look at Radermacher’s post and see if his method feels more comfortable.
Footnotes:
This will, I know, bring me many explanations of how it is the right thing but I stand by my judgment. Of course, that’s the beauty of Emacs: we can both be right. Or at least have it our way.