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Comment by fp | Hacker News Reader

At least one, considering that PG wrote he used vi.

Apart from that, I think an 'easy' editor would help beginners. I you know neither Emacs nor Lisp, Emacs is quite a tough beast.

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I've never tried it, but I know of people using Cusp, the Lisp extension for Eclipse: http://bitfauna.com/projects/cusp/

I should have learned Emacs at University, but they stopped teaching it the year before I arrived. And it's too much of a learning curve to learn it on my own.

Is there any sort of beginner/self-learner friendly tutorial for emacs?

I think many people would like to use emacs, but run into too many barriers.

This is a good starting point: Learning GNU Emacs http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565921528/

This might ease some pains: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs

Thanks for the links. And thanks for all the advice guys.

I learned it on my first job - probably the best way to learn since you can learn from other pros.

Emacs is a great editor, but word of caution: you will spend countless hours customizing it. I think after 15 years of use, I have gained those lost weekends hacking elisp :)

The tutorial built into emacs is actually quite good. C-h t

Yeah. Emacs is a massive pain to learn. In my case, I forced myself to stop using other tools so I would have to learn it. Come to think about it, thats pretty much how I learn everything. I learnt about linux after I forcefully removed windows from my laptop and I learned how to use bash after I forced myself to stop using nautilus.

Was it worth it?

yes.

PG uses vi to code in Lisp, used to copy-and-paste to repl but he now drags-and-drops code to repl!!!!! 0_o

(I am not kidding)

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