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Comment by ssivark | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what you mean by Emacs needing better documentation — IME it is exemplary of particularly good documentation + introspection, integrated well with the editor.

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Maybe it's too dry for todays culture. You can see numerous people asking for a specific way to communicate: clear single page of features, live tutorials etc

I agree that emacs comes with almost all you need to understand it, but there's one inherent flaw: it's large. It's a joke in the community that nobody is immune to a late "wait, emacs can do that ? I've been using it for N decades and I had no idea.."

Content discovery is somewhat hard, especially in the beginning when you don't know enough of the vocabulary and capabilities to easily find what you want. Ironically, it's at that time in your journey learning how Emacs works, that you need the discovering capabilities the most.

True. But there are a few paradoxes. Back in the days there was not a log to learn.. limited internet, basic html pages. I think people asking for too much is also backward. Good concepts don't come easy in a way. ... I guess there's a balance.

One thing that I wondered is how to make the manual more lispy/repl oriented.

That's fair, I think the style is too dry sometimes but now that I've used Emacs for some time (3 years?) I just look into the pkg docs when I need something, which is rare.

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