I love Emacs. For all of its warts, "historical reasons", and vestigal features, it is the editor that really opened my eyes to alternative ways to do introspection and programming, in general.
I want to believe the friction comes if you try to "fix" Emacs too early.
You kinda have to conform to the Emacs way when learning it and leave all of your assumptions at the door. I see a lot of people who come to Emacs from Vim expecting Evil Mode to be the panacea for Emacs. It's not. At the end of the day, it's still Emacs and people run into friction because they expect it to be Vim-ish all over or they want to force Emacs to be Vim.
Personally, I came from Vim to Emacs via Spacemacs. I was a bit of a zealot about Vim until I tried Emacs. I left all of my expectations behind and I was pleasantly surprised by many things inside. Were there things I disliked? Of course. But, I wasn't looking for an excuse to hate it.
> I see a lot of people who come to Emacs from Vim expecting Evil Mode to be the panacea for Emacs. It's not. At the end of the day, it's still Emacs
Yes. I've been Emacs guy for close to two decades now, and switched to Evil about four years ago, because Vim controls are just better, no two ways about it. However you still need to escape back into Emacs every now and then to do various un-Evil'd tidbits. That's easy for me, but would be problematic for someone who expects Evil to (as you put it) "fix Emacs".
I had a similar path to Emacs: became really proficient with Vim, avoided Emacs since everyone I knew hated it, saw someone doing things with incredible speed and efficiency in Emacs at Enova (hi Kyle) that I had never imagined could be done, tried Emacs myself, and spent weeks customizing it to become extremely fast with rapid development in Clojure using CIDER.
But now that I do vanilla front-end dev, I have found VS Code to give me nearly all the same productivity I had before, but with practically no configuration, and in an editor that actually has reasonable per-pixel scrolling. (Emacs added per-pixel scrolling in 2017 but still got it wrong somehow.)
In some mysterious psychological way that I don't fully understand, per-pixel scrolling helps me to mentally keep my place significantly faster and easier than per-line scrolling.
Similar to the two sibling posters, I find pixel-scrolling (particular with the weighted momentum feeling you get on macos) to be more visually comfortable and easier to track.
I found it frustrating in spacemacs that I couldn't get this set up properly (and I'm not even sure if it's possible too). Everything else in emacs was eye-opening and fun.
I want to believe the friction comes if you try to "fix" Emacs too early.
You kinda have to conform to the Emacs way when learning it and leave all of your assumptions at the door. I see a lot of people who come to Emacs from Vim expecting Evil Mode to be the panacea for Emacs. It's not. At the end of the day, it's still Emacs and people run into friction because they expect it to be Vim-ish all over or they want to force Emacs to be Vim.
Personally, I came from Vim to Emacs via Spacemacs. I was a bit of a zealot about Vim until I tried Emacs. I left all of my expectations behind and I was pleasantly surprised by many things inside. Were there things I disliked? Of course. But, I wasn't looking for an excuse to hate it.