Three HUGE Mistakes New Emacs Users Make

It's a common story. A person hears about Emacs and wants to give it a try, but their initial experience is usually pretty bad. Why? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with three HUGE mistakes that new Emacs users tend to make.

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[scarceorange]

The biggest mistake is not using Emacs.

[jogo]

Startup time of less than 2 seconds is not a problem because you should never quit emacs in the first place.

[jsiegel]

@dt: Terminal mode emacs instances can indeed leverage the server. Just use the -nw flag with 'emacsclient' (rather than 'emacs, ' which is what you used in the demo). Greybeards like me (I started using emacs in mid-eighties) used it for years before there was a truly viable graphical mode. Terminal mode is still faster, and with a properly-configured terminal (or emulator) the fontifying ("faces") are just as effective. It's the "always-works" mode for emacs :-) Love the channel, keep on keepin' on :-)

[learningbird]

Derek, Derek...it is 2 years after you started with Emacs that you explain these very important features, that many of us never heard of???
Time for you to rebuild a deep, complete, 8 or 10 part tutorial on Doom Emacs!

[jatufin]

I've been using Emacs some 30 years. At last activated the daemon after watching the video :D Better late than ever, I guess...

[sebaszwarc]

I don't consider not running server as mistake. Seriously, fighting about 2 seconds launchtime?

[naumanahmad]

I was a vim user for quite some time but learned about doom emacs from DT when you started posting about it about a year ago. Had a rough start but now that I've got the hang of it It's awesome. Your videos were really helpful then to get me started and now I rarely use anything else. Everything except browsing and media is now emacs for me and rarely use terminal as well. Emacs (Doom) fulfills like 80% of my workstation needs

[hansdampf]

The terminal version is great for when you have a development server and you only can ssh into it.

I use this all the time and it feels like having a proper desktop app

[matejskulsky]

You had me in the last part. I'm switching to emacs because of terminal side. I'm switching from vs-code because of option ssh-ing to my machine and have just one IDE.
(on site I'd use vs-code, ssh = nano (simple for small changes, annoying for complex changes))
I'm glad you mentioned that it is fine for tty only access.

[userx]

Hej man...just want to say...I've been a vim user for a long time..and since your first doom emacs video..I got in love with it...and now it is basically my windows manager kkkk I can only thank you for the amazing content! ^^

[modrobert]

Good tips, haven't used Emacs much. The terminal in the example with running process is not useless though, pressing ctrl-z and then typing 'bg' will set it free.

[distant]

hey dt!really nice and helpful video, being a new emacs user myself.keep it up <3

[webdavis]

I’ve been using Vim for 12ish years now. Over the past year I’ve gotten into Obsidian and also iOS development so I haven’t used vim/neovim a ton lately. About to make a pivot back to non-iso development and I’m ready for something new. I’m going to give this a shot. Thanks for the video.

[areg]

Small correction: SPC . is not dired, it's an ivy prompt

[thingsiplay]

The right way to use Emacs is to forget everything you learned about Linux and make Emacs to your operating system.

[AmirHosseinHonardust]

Thanks DT! After 6 months of Emacs usage, I reached the same conclusion that first impression of Emacs is not doing it justice. It's like opening up xmonad, and tinkering with it for 10 minutes, and decide that it cannot do much. It just doesn't make any sense.

[simonced]

In many of your videos, I see you type the full path for programs that you have aliases for.
At least in bash, you can prefix the program name with \ and it'll run the non alias command ;)

[DiogoGDF]

I started using emacs yesterday, great timing to upload this video!

[xA]

Emacs is GNU Hurd but Richard Stallman refuses to acknowledge it. ;-)

[ViniciusProvenzano]

Your best video in a long time! Great content!