What does HackerNews think of emacs-which-key?

I think they meant this package: https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

Sounds like the package which-key [1] might help you out. (It comes pre-configured for those who use Doom Emacs, but I was using it in my personal config for awhile.). From the about: which-key is a minor mode for Emacs that displays the key bindings following your currently entered incomplete command (a prefix) in a popup.

[1] https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

While I agree that a GUI can be a bit more discoverable in general, I don't think CLIs (and more generally, terminal-based programs) are necessarily for the l33t crowd. We've just been conditioned that way by the fact that most user-facing applications these days are GUI based.

But think of the DOS-based programs of yore, like WordPerfect 5, and the Turbo C/Pascal IDEs... they had menus on screen, easy-to-access help screens, etc. to guide the novice. (What's the Web-app equivalent to the F1 key?) History shows that WordPerfect was fine to use as a non-technical person. (I wish our modern word processors were so simple to use as WP 5, actually -- modern app-design trends have bloated the word processor into a confusing mess, IMO, and I think the average office worker who has worked in both generations might agree.)

I really like the approach taken by the 'which-key' extension for Emacs, which is particularly well used in the Spacemacs distribution. Pressing the space bar pulls up a very nicely organized menu of actions, including access to help. It's extremely helpful both as a memory aid, and also for discovering new features.

Obviously a nice menu doesn't get the user fully past the initial Emacs learning curve, which supports your argument. But for the next level of user -- from novice to initiate -- it's a tremendous productivity boost.

- https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key - http://spacemacs.org/

Fellow n00b here, but maybe a little further along in my emacs journey.

I started with Emacs as my first editor when I first was learning how to code a few years ago. I played with it for about a year, then left it for VSCode when I got a job as the projects at the time were heavily JS/TypeScript based, then slowly went back to Emacs as I started to feel frustrated at how painful it was to do certain things on VSCode that I knew would be lower-friction on an editor like Emacs or Vim.

This second time around it has helped me a lot to not feel like I need to rush to master it, taking time instead to focus on committing one or two commands to muscle memory every 10 days or so, and looking at other people's configuration files for inspiration. Studying these configs in particular [0], [1] helped me quite a bit, as they're nicely commented, big enough to have some useful stuff in them and get real work done, but small enough to understand fairly quickly. I also make it a point to not add stuff to my config that I don't understand and try to follow good practices around commenting and code organization

Being OK with navigating inefficiently but making a conscious effort to learn one or two commands to handle stuff that feels painful (kill line, jump to beginning of file, jump to end of file, jump to end of line, back-to-indentation) then modifying anything that doesn't feel natural.

Learning to find help inside emacs: C-h b to list all bindings in the current buffer, or discover-my-major [2] for a friendlier interface, or [3] (highly recommended) for displaying and filtering available bindings as you type them. Cheatsheet [4] for creating your own cheatsheets to note and recall commands you're working on learning.

Finally, taking advantage of the fact that you don't need to leave Emacs for certain things. For example, at work we use Trello, and I love being able to check Trello from inside Emacs via org-trello-mode. It's very nice to not have to context switch when coding. Not to mention Magit (super powerful git gui inside emacs) and Tramp mode (for editing files over ssh from the comfort of emacs).

Also, I've generally found people to be extremely helpful on #emacs on freenode IRC. I've learned a lot thru osmosis just observing conversation there :)

[0] https://github.com/jsks/dotfiles/tree/master/emacs/.emacs.d

[1] https://github.com/flyingmachine/emacs-for-clojure/

[2] https://framagit.org/steckerhalter/discover-my-major

[3] https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

[4] https://melpa.org/#/cheatsheet

You can get that in Emacs with the which-key: https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key

Still a long road to go. But appearently neovim is working on making which-key (https://github.com/justbur/emacs-which-key) possible, which would close a great gap.