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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried vanilla Emacs? It doesn't require any configuration to just start using it.

The only thing you have to configure is your entire brain. Seriously, for anyone under 40, pressing Ctrl-Z should undo, not hide the window. I say this as a fanatical emacs user. There is nothing straightforward about vanilla emacs for someone whose software expectations have been shaped by the conventions of the last three decades!

I can't speak to its completeness as I haven't used it personally, but Emacs does ship with cua-mode which enables a lot of those keybindings. It's just not enabled by default, as most existing users wouldn't use it.

i hated emacs at first for this reason. ctrl-v should be paste, ctrl-c should be copy, right !? now though i have emacs bindings system wide

what brought me to emacs first was intrigue - why do people keep saying that this little shitty-looking weird editor is the most powerful program on my computer :) they weren't wrong

Am under 40. Regularity get annoyed by new windows opening when I just wanted to go down one line (and yes, I have found the gnome emacs input mode setting).

or something preconfigured like spacemacs or prelude. I think the biggest problem of emacs is that it's an entire universe by itself: everything is there in a zillion flavours (which always ALMOST work out of the box) and I don't know which one to pick.

I was explicitly thinking about spacemacs when I wrote that. I guess it might be attractive to a VS code user but it's a lot to manage.

As a VSCode user, no spacemacs isn't really attractive. What's good about VSCode is that it works really well for all skill level and require almost no learning to start with. Spacemacs (and vanilla emacs) don't really fit that description. To be fair, most IDEs also don't fit that description.

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