Do not use a distribution. Yes I know.. you have read that before and then you used Doom or Spacemacs anyways. That's me in the past. And it never worked out for me. I always ended up trying to configure things and the whole setup was too complex for me, so I failed.
Over the last 10 years I have been a heavy (n)vim user but I tried Emacs multiple times. Always a distro. It never worked out. Now over the last year I was trying Emacs with a vanilla setup and configured everything from scratch. With the AIs this is super simple because they can help you get out of config trouble.
The experience was way better than before. After my one year experience I have switched back to neovim but I still have become a fan of Emacs and I have adapted my nvim config. Stuff like dired, magit, compile-mode I have found equivalent nvim plugins and use them now.
https://www.masteringemacs.org/
This provides an excellent base and exploration of the builtin packages, then you can customize your experience on top and make it your own.
Better to just start using it, and ask your friendly local LLM when you need help. Back in the early 2000s, I think I used emacs for 3 or 4 years knowing only how to open/save/close files, switch buffers, undo, and quit.
It will be a struggle. It was around 2 months before I felt remotely comfortable in Emacs. And nearly a year before I really felt at home. It's a long road, but gradually you mold the editor to yourself so tightly that you'll never be able to go back. The remarkable thing is that the progression never stops. The tool just keeps getting sharper and sharper.
No one will ever convince me that there is something better than vim mode for editing text (or comparable modal editors).
I dont use your "other apps" enough to know exactly what you mean, but it gives me the urge to point out, "Emacs 'frames' are actually more like windows in other apps" :)
Especially if you don't want to use an agent to help you get started. If you're using an agent, starting from vanilla is much more feasible.
I only started using an AI to help fix issues or understand configuration problems when my config was already >1000 lines.
But yea there are several ways to approach this :)
So I guess you and others here have had the experience of building something that was your own that felt better than the distro?
I am not saying they are bad, just not for me.
And I think they make it somehow harder to discover the true power of emacs: bending it to your will & basically forging your own custom environment, not only for editing but so much more (git, mails, pdfs,...).
I think bedrock is reasonable, and so is Prelude (https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude). I used to have a sprawling init.el, but these days is pretty compact (236 lines), mostly using straight to install packages and then configuration for gptel, agent-shell, and various hydras (https://github.com/abo-abo/hydra) to quickly execute various functions.
Every line in init.el is something that you have to maintain and move with you.
And when you're using someone else's computer, their init.el won't be what you expect.
I still use web searches to look up Emacs things occasionally, but the built-in help commands are still useful because they're naturally tied to (and organized by) the core code entities that power Emacs.
I'd also add `C-h b` to show you the key bindings. (And `C-h` after a prefix key will usually show you the bindings that start with that prefix.) `C-h a` for apropos to search commands by substring can also be useful.
The thing that makes it really "self documenting" is that these help commands reflect the live environment at the moment you use it. If you've added a new binding in your init.el, `C-h b` and `C-h k` will show it. If you've added a new function in your init.el, or loaded a custom package, all those functions can now be found via `C-h f`. The help system will show you the doc strings for them and provide hyperlinks right to the source.
Moreover, this works for anything that you define on the fly. Open an Emacs lisp buffer, type some elisp code to define a function or variable, execute the definition, and now it'll appear under the above in the help system the next time you invoke help.
Emacs can "describe" anything contextually. Describe current mode, character at point, specific command, any variable, etc. With Wilfred/helpful it gives you even more stuff. If you're not sure what's the exact symbol/command/mode name you're looking for, there are 'apropos' set of commands. Also, absolutely learn Info and how to navigate it - it's enormously descriptive and very useful - it beats googling stuff up, because a) it works offline b) it gives you more accurate info about your current system.
C-h r (open Emacs manual)
C-s "line numbers"
Also apropos works.
I assume you meant orderless?
That said, I've been using it for... uhh... about 30 years now, and I've honestly never picked this skill up myself very much. I can only use it minimally. Just googling is fine, and as others have commented today (although maybe in that other thread about emacs), AI makes it even easier because it can just straight up write the modifications for you if you need them.
I've been using emacs as my primary editor since about 2002 and I hate this take. Emacs Lisp is by far the worst part of emacs. It is a horrible language, best kept dark and deep in the vaults, not to be used, unless at the uttermost end of need.
My config, after more than two decades, is about 400 lines, and I consider that excessive.
I'd already known Common Lisp from a prior class, which mostly used some Mac based REPL. Shortly after, I had real Emacs and various CL and Scheme runtimes on my Linux PC. Scheme was my obsession at the time. A lot of my pathway into CS was puzzling over what it would take to implement a Scheme runtime. But, I felt no desire to get into the bizarre-to-me elisp dialect. It just felt gross.
Probably because of early years using shared terminal server rooms and hosts, I also learned that over-customization just became a pain when I had to move between environments. I ran the Emacs that came bundled with my Linux distro, with the extensions that came packaged along with it. Mostly I just tried to have Xresources to get my preferred color scheme and text fonts.
From all of this, I'm nearly some kind of old school Unix fundamentalist. I've never wanted an IDE. Or rather, my IDE has always been the host OS, shell prompt, filesystem state, and other terminals. I use adjacent shells to run builds, tests, debuggers, version control, etc. Emacs is just my editor. I've never, ever wanted any editor to subsume my OS, window management, and these other tools.
My favorite interface feature is creating several "frames" (separate X windows) viewing into the same buffers. Sometimes several files side by side, and sometimes several editing viewports on the same file. I also use the X based menus to find many esoteric features or session settings for which I would never memorize the command names.
But, when I am forced to run Emacs in text terminal mode, I revert to thinking of it like JOVE. I'd rather open multiple terminals (and SSH connections, when remote) and have each one run its own ephemeral Emacs instance with one buffer for a brief foray into one file. Somehow, I've never had the urge to fire up an Emacs server to share state between these. I just find my way back to a proper graphical Emacs when I want that kind of complex editing session.
The only Emacs modes I use are for syntax highlighting and auto-indentation. I also never wanted Emacs "windowing", i.e. text terminal muxing. For me, learning to kill accidental window splits was roughly the same need as learning how to exit/abort out of accidentally launched vi. Repulsed, I head for the exit!
My favorite editing features are just search, find-replace, and find-replace-regexp. But search is mostly just a fast-scroll to me, jumping forward or back to text I know is there. If I'm really searching, I more likely mouse over to a terminal window and run find and/or grep from a shell. My favorite advanced editing feature is buffer-compare (Ediff), which I use for merging changes between two files in side-by-side frames.
Oh, and I despise the GNU infos-style help system too. I much prefer manpages, or secondarily reading docs in a web browser.
These days we're all spoiled by Visual Studio Code, Zed, even things like Geany and Notepad++. So it makes less sense for neophytes to start with something as ancient and idiosyncratic as Emacs, and Emacs does not enjoy nearly the prominence or mindshare it had decades ago. (Though I understand its absolute user base has grown.)
Emacs was literally the sanest option unless you could bribe the sysadmin into installing "joe" or similar. ("pico" and "nano" came later).
The other thing is back in the day emacs was often a good option for running clients to connect to things like IRC or MUDs or MOOs, and even Gopher and the early web. It was also an excellent news and mail reader!
And so I used emacs as a general text editor and MOO and IRC client long before I ever used it for writing source code really (for which it was also obviously very good).
It's a holdover from the days when people used to type without looking at their keyboards or waste time and effort taking their fingers off the home row to find and stab around with some kind of multi-axis valuator device sitting on their desk somewhere.
Using gptel? Or something else?
Emacs has come a long way in terms of in-built features. The only problem is that, in the name of not breaking backwards-compatibility (or something like that), the archaic defaults have remained. Just a little bit of simple config (either from Bedrock or, heck, even an LLM) will get you very far.
I'm working on a new version of Bedrock for Emacs 31. If you're using the release candidate (which, because it's Emacs, is more stable than most other operating systems) then check out the `emacs31` branch.
As a user since '97, I've often felt that this philosophy is entirely, well, backwards. I know how to read the release notes to learn of such changes and how to edit my personal init.el file to revert a setting if I don't like the new default. As long as no one takes away the option, the default doesn't really matter too much to me. But newcomers who might not yet be comfortable with editing their init.el files could really benefit from a more optimal out-of-box experience.
(And besides that, often the newer option is something that I've already moved on to, so making it the new default means I can now remove it from my init.el. I always enjoy when I discover that I can cut something from my init.el because it's now in base Emacs.)
Then, to change a default from `old` to `new`, you instead change it to `configVersion >= x ? new : old`, and add some kind of non-fatal warning in the else case instructing users to set their config to `old` explicitly.
You don't break people's setups, they become aware of new defaults without reading release notes, and new users get the new defaults.
[0] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA125287.pdf (Brian Reid's CMU Ph.D dissertation a.k.a. a manual for Scribe).
That said, I’m usually in vim. Emacs is a neverending rabbit hole of a hobby that begs to be tinkered with forever. I find it easier to just do useful stuff in vim and I’m always trying to add a new efficient keybinding or function to my Emacs config.