> Of course none of this applies to emacs users. They are are a secret society unto, themselves, kind of like the Masons.
Dude. Using Emacs really isn't that hard, and mystifying it doesn't do anybody any favors. (I can understand if it's not your cup of tea, though.) It just does a bad job of "creating the illusion of simplicity" (as Grady Booch once put it).
I love emacs, but it is anything but inuitive. None of its features are discoverable and to learn how to use it you have to read a bunch of info pages.
The problem is, to read those, you already have to know what "M-x" means. Catch-22.
Emacs is self-documenting, yes, but its help system (much like the rest of it!) seems to be designed for experienced users who can't quite remember the syntax for font-lock-keywords* , rather than new users who trying to figure out how to switch buffers or what "font-lock" even is. It's awesome once you get it, but using a help system to answer questions about basics shouldn't assume experience.
I have used Emacs on almost every day of my life for about 10 years. I love Emacs and use those functions (as well as describe-key) fairly frequently. What's my favorite way to figure out how to do some random arcane thing in emacs?
Google.
It's often pleasantly surprised that some task I thought was esoteric is actually solved in the standard emacs libs, but the fact that I had to go to Google to find it doesn't say great things about the editor's discoverability. IMO, Emacs is about as discoverable as a dynamic programming language with a decent interactive interpreter such as ipython or irb.
I'm not saying it's the wrong tradeoff -- but if you want to learn Emacs you probably should read a book or two and ideally spend some time with a master. You really can't just bring it up and figure out that M-q will conveniently re-wrap the current paragraph or that M-^ joins the current line to the previous line and removes intermediate whitespace.
To use the Help features, type the C-h character, and then a
character saying what kind of help you want. If you are REALLY lost,
type C-h ? and Emacs will tell you what kinds of help it can give.
If you have typed C-h and decide you do not want any help, just
type C-g to cancel it.
The fact that `C-h b` is not mentioned in the tutorial doesn't imply that one can't find it or doesn't know how to use it.
There are hundreds emacs commands. The fact that description for any command can be found through help doesn't mean that you've discovered them all after spending 30 minutes reading the Emacs Tutorial.
The point is that the direct link to 'C-h b' is mentioned in the tutorial. That section of the tutorial also has sections on a few of the options in C-h.
That is how pivo found it. By going "oh, I wonder what else is there" and hitting C-h ?
If you're not the type of person that does stuff like that, emacs probably isn't the editor for you. Hell, software development probably isn't for you.
Yeah, emacs is large - and has lots of features. Once you've been through the tut, and spent a few days with the editor, they're quite discoverable. It does make the assumption that you want to discover though.
Seriously though, what does "apropos" mean? In Common Lisp I always have to stop and remember it whenever I need to search packages for a symbol. A dictionary defines it as "by way of interjection or further comment", which isn't really meaningful. Maybe the name is a historical artifact?
Dude. Using Emacs really isn't that hard, and mystifying it doesn't do anybody any favors. (I can understand if it's not your cup of tea, though.) It just does a bad job of "creating the illusion of simplicity" (as Grady Booch once put it).