> I don't know LISP (any LISP!) at all

I'm a Lisper. I switch between Lisp dialects, sometimes multiple times a day. Since I got my LLM harness to work from inside of Emacs I no longer need to even look at Lisp that it generates for my config.

It is very justified use of AI - if anything breaks, it breaks for me, and mostly just for me. And whenever something doesn't work as expected - I don't even try to debug it anymore - my harness has introspective capabilities - it can run the profiler, monitor changing vars, debug and just fix things.

Now is the best time to try Emacs. If people before could complain that Lisp is weird and not easy to grok, it's not a valid complaint anymore.

Been using Emacs for 37 years. Didn't start learning Elisp until 6 years ago. It's never too late. Wrote an Elisp Cheatsheet for Python Programmers, which helped me level up. Perhaps this might as helpful to you.

https://kickingvegas.github.io/elisp-for-python/

I find it interesting actually. Not embarrassing. You mastered the feature layer more than I. I went into lisp with dreams of making my own features but turns out I was quite limited.

Different psychologies

You're doing it right. When I was gainfully employed, emacs was purely a black-box means to a greater end, i.e., promotions and added responsibility. In my premature retirement, the vortex of emacs became an end unto itself. Believe me, I'd happily trade my emacs expertise for a more meaningful pursuit.

I've been using emacs everyday for the last 25ish years. Although I do read elisp and occasionally write some, I'm far from fluent. You do not need to know lisp to use emacs (although it is funny you didn't pickup some just by osmosis).

We have finite time in our lives. I'd argue it's eminently reasonable to spend time on things other that Emacs' guts, unless that's what tickles your interest.

You may be the most productive emacs user.

emacs is a rabbithole and the cost is rarely worth it. LLM agents do a great job already customizing your configuration for you.

I've always told people: You can be a power Emacs user without learning elisp.

I myself used Emacs heavily for 9 years before learning elisp (clicked on my 3rd attempt).

IMO, the included Elisp guide is not good for beginners. My recommendation:

Separate the language from the ecosystem. First focus on simply learning the basics. How do you set a variable? How do you write a loop? How do you write a function? These things are as easy in Elisp as they are in other languages. Perhaps use Exercism to practice.

Of course, also learn the related keybindings (C-M-x to evaluate, C-x C-e, etc).

Only then start understanding some of the basics of integrating with the rest of Emacs (unwind-protect, save-excursion, save-restriction, etc).

> IDEs and now Claude have taken over

100% completely opposite experience. Emacs is hands down the king of any kind of text-manipulation. And not only on the composition side. Most editors and IDEs are focused on the composition side of things - making text, adjusting text, amending text. And code btw, is nothing but structured text.

Emacs opens gates for text consumption - I'm reading this entire HN thread in Emacs, just like I consume Jira, Slack, Telegram, Reddit; control YT vids, my browser tabs and history, etc. I search through Splunk and Datadog logs, Wiktionary entries and just general googling - all done in Emacs. I browse million-line codebases on GH without ever having to clone them. If there's a piece of any kind of text in the computational vicinity to my active Emacs instance - this laptop and all connectable devices, I can easily make use of it.

And this gets incredibly important in the age of LLMs. I can read, manipulate, navigate, search through, diff, sort, group, slice, dice, salt and pepper any kind of text. Give me just about any other editor instead and I immediately will feel handicapped.

IDEs that are not malleable (by design) are at an exact disadvantage. I can change any aspect of my editor in the middle of typing this very comment without ever losing the state, the context, or my mental focus. No IDE even hypothetically capable of doing any of that.

With Claude it feels like you don’t need IDE’s anymore though. emacs/vim are more relevant than ever imo.

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Some of us would say it is a Lisp programming environment, with influences from Lisp Machines (Zmacs), having a text editor as sample application.

It's kind of striking how that joke post about ed (from 1991) presented Emacs as extremely resource-wasteful

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

but I guess trends elsewhere were so keen on adding abstractions that now Emacs is an efficient, parsimonious choice by comparison.

GNU Emacs really didn't start until 1984, but I keep thinking it would be interesting to compare Emacs' resource usage to Zed (or Gram). Then I realize I can't be bothered to run either of those long enough to do it.

Compared to VSCode, Eight Meg And Constantly Swapping does sound ridiculously parsimonious in 2026.

You apparently missed the explosion in Emacs activity in the 2010s. I, too, remember using Emacs in the early millennium and feeling like a partisan of one powerful but nevertheless unpopular editor, with an uncertain future. But once the Mastering Emacs blog, Org-Mode, and Sacha Chua came along, suddenly there were so many new packages to install and tips for one's own config, and things like the pure-gtk build brought UI improvements going beyond merely look and feel.

In the early millennium, I as a Emacs user had hardly anyone to actually talk about Emacs with, even on nerd hangouts like Slashdot or the dedicated Freenode channel. Since the 2010s, one can make oneself practically a whole social life around Emacs.