I’ve also never been able to get over the hump from “configuration” to “extending” (if that makes sense). This was a really interesting read.

Emacs also has a lot of inbuit tools to help you understand what's going on under the hood.

- `info` lets you read the emacs manual

- `apropos` lets you search for various elisp symbols in the editor, so if you're looking for something vaguer than a direct function or command you can search via apropos.

- The in-built `describe` (though I use a fantastic package called `helpful`) lets you figure out what the definition of a given variable, function, or command is. You can even look at what command a given key binding calls.

- Claude does a great job at teaching details of the editing/programming model of emacs which helps if you'd rather not read through the entire emacs manual

Things like this make emacs a joy to hack on (until you're trying to debug some slightly annoying behavior or crufty event loop thing ;)

Step 1) Remove emacs

Step 2) Use ViM

Step 3) Grab popcorn

Jokes aside, the learning curve for Emacs always threw me. It seems to me at least there doesn't seem to be any consensus on the best practices or guidelines, I've always ran into opinionated takes that seem really tricky to configure. I suppose the same could be said for vim, but neoVim really streamlined a lot for me personally.