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_a_a_a_

> I’m aware of “apropos”, but it also uses antiquated terminology

can you clarify 'antiquated' for me please

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Here’s an example:

M-x, “apropos”, RET, “copy text”

No apropos matches for “copy text”

Using just “copy” returns two undocumented variables first. I did eventually find kill-ring-save, but it took more digging than I’d like. Obviously if I embraced (or at least remembered) Emacs’s terminology I’d have a better experience, but I’m not there yet.

Edit again: “copy selection” found copy-region-as-kill, which is maybe what I should have searched for originally. Not sure yet how it differs from kill-ring-save.

OK, fair enough

I'm sympathetic to this argument but I just searched apropos for "cut" and then for "copy" and got many commands related to cutting/copying text. Granted also that the words "copy" and "cut" don't seem to appear in the results, so you still have some reading to do, but the metadata is apparently there.

What version of Emacs did you try?

Yank instead of paste. Frame instead of window. Kill instead of delete. kill-ring-save instead of copy.

I was going to add 'visit instead of open', but I guess that bit has changed over the years. C-x C-v no longer invokes 'visit-file'.

While I completely get what you're saying it's not really fair to expect Emacs to be compatible with systems that came after it. If you going to work in Emacs you have to pretty much work on its terms, which I think is fairly reasonable and speaking only for myself, I found very worthwhile.

If you think it would make it more accessible to have certain changes, email the Emacs issue/bug people with constructive suggestions and see what they say; they are extremely responsive (then try doing the same with Apple or Microsoft and see what happens :-) )

I'm a happy Emacs user myself. Nobody change anything for my sake.

It absolutely is fair to expect Emacs to use industry standard terminology to avoid confusing users. At this point, keeping the outdated, idiosyncratic terminology and default UI paradigms serves no purpose except unnecessary gatekeeping.

> (then try doing the same with Apple or Microsoft and see what happens :-) )

Microsoft, the authors of Visual Studio Code, the editor most developers use? Whose team has been lauded for being super responsive to developer feedback?

> It absolutely is fair to expect Emacs to use industry standard terminology to avoid confusing users

"Initial release 1976; 47 years ago" (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs).

There was no such standard terminology back then.

May I recommend you avoid using Emacs to avoid the concomitant headache of getting involved in Emacs discussions, thank you.It clearly isn't for you.

For the record, the intent of my original post was just to see if someone had already encountered and solved my problem (having difficulty finding Emacs commands, due to inexperience).

The use of “archaic”, etc. was meant humorously, and not as a complaint about Emacs. I wouldn’t mind if the maintainers added some more modern synonyms for commonly needed commands, but I wouldn’t expect them to.

The following is my personal experience only. When I decided to learn Emacs I bought a book (the fat O'Reilly one),sat down and practised the keystrokes. I made a few scratch notes as well. Within a few hours, not days, I found movement to be extremely straightforward and much more comfortable than the old windows/mac way, for the great part.

When I was doing my own project I would do most of my work in Emacs but regularly swap back to VStudio because of its LSP support. Swapping back and forth between these two very different environments brought on a few mistakes (wrong key in wrong editor) but astonishingly few. I got comfortable doing switches pretty quickly which is surprising because they are so utterly different, but that's how I found it to be.

I ended up spending more time in VS because of better LSP, but built-in LSP support is coming in the next Emacs. Good. Because once I went back to 'standard' keyboard commands, I never felt comfortable. It just doesn't feel right. Also Emacs is so vastly more capable in some ways it just blows VS away. In other ways VS is better certainly, in the more advanced technical stuff such as LSP, in other ways, screw it.

So: grab a book, prepared to put in a bit of time, good luck!

(Edit: just remembered, I certainly did buy the book but started off doing the built-in Emacs tutorial before that)

That's a very thoughtful response, thanks. It would be nice if I could see into the future to know whether or not my time spent learning Emacs will pay off :)

Good luck with your decision, whichever it is! My only suggestion is avoid Gnus which I found an incredibly flaky mess and regretted ever touching it.

The fact that Emacsen developers started to create text-manipulation terminology earlier is laudable. But it doesn't make Emacsen terms better. From purely pragmatic perspective we have almost a separate language which brings additional barrier for entry, while adding no particular value. I really feel like we stick to sunk-cost fallacy here.

I fear I may be wasting my time replying, but I'm going to try and understand where you're coming from rather than answer your question about Emacs.

Your complaint comes across very much like moaning that strawberries are not the same as cherries. Quite true, and that is exactly why it's a good thing; I would prefer to have a world with strawberries and cherries. Emacs is different from (e.g.) Visual Studio and that's a good thing. Your complaint seems to be that you want Emacs to resemble something else, okay, and after the terminology matches do you want the key bindings to match as well,? And then what do you want? How close in the end, do you want them to look and behave? And if you want them very close, then just use what you're familiar with already and don't worry about us Emacs users.

ISTM you are trying to turn Emacs into visual studio, if not then please make it clear what precisely you want other than injecting phrases like "barrier to entry". Please be specific.

The biggest barrier to entry for you is yourself; the fact that you're not prepared to try something different.

So please tell me, what exactly do you want Emacs to end up looking like, if not a clone of Visual Studio?

I'm not sure if your answer is for my comment, or you posted it to the wrong thread. If it's the former, could you clarify what part of my comment you answering?

You're talking about terminology being a barrier to entry. Terminology is trivial but suppose we changed it (yank -> paste, kill -> cut etc). Now you'll not be happy with the key bindings (C-y to paste, C-k to cut) and want them to be replaced with the Windows/Mac standard – right? Because developing new muscle-memory for a different style of working is a lot heavier than just learning new terms for existing things.

Having done that you'll want all the other key bindings changed surely?

And I can see it progressing from their – Emacs regular expressions don't behave quite like visual studio IIRC, for example. Search and replace is pretty weird if you're not used to it. Rectangular selection is very different in Emacs from visual studio. etc. If you change Emacs you lose a lot of what makes it Emacs, and good.

So if I'm not misrepresenting you, and apologies if I am, I don't see your demands for change stopping until Emacs resembles, perhaps, visual studio, in which case why not just use visual studio?

I hope that makes sense.

Now, it's clearer what you mean. But still doesn't not make much sense, sorry! You apparently see something which I didn't say, and refute something which I didn't say with impressive energy. No, making docs using common terms of today won't make you wish to turn Emacs to Visual Studio, or whatever other IDE you don't like. There are Emacs tutorials written in languages other than English where standard terminology for that particular language used. You know, you would not invent a separate word just to mirror idiosyncrasy of Emacs slang present in English. Trust me, there are no signs that after reading them somebody got obsessed with turning Emacs into Visual Studio.

Then you destroy any remaining trace of a link between the key binding and the action. You can imagine the conversation

"control p to go up? Control y to paste? v to go down – perhaps that's v for vertically down or something? Who designed this crap anyway".

Maybe it would work but I'm not feeling optimistic :-)

Emacs is a programmable environment constructor, ain't it? Significant share of users prefer evil-mode, and use "p in command mode", not c-y. There are people who have custom keyboards (and even pedals) and their bindings often tuned to that fact. So "control y" is not more sacred than the leftmost pedal, and link is ephemeral anyway.

I think the mnemonic link matters for beginners, but let's say I agree with you. By calling the link ephemeral haven't you just undermined your own argument that the terminology is a barrier?

Of course I haven't as I made zero claim about mnemonics. We're talking about readability i.e. cognitive burden which by definition increases with amount of unknown words, or words with unexpected contextual meanings

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