gropius

Don't forget to check out the MELPA (melpa.org) repository, which has a staggering array of packages for Emacs. If people do something on computers, chances are someone does it in Emacs and there's a package on MELPA to support it.

Also, the road to Emacs proficiency will be a journey, and you'll want to think about Emacs as something you'll gradually tinker with and tweak to get to a set up and understanding that is satisfying. It's not shiny nor whiz-bang by any means, but path through the learning curve can be extremely rewarding.

I don't "google," I "web search." And I don't use big G as my initial, primary search engine.

Using Google "like a pro" may have been a possibility in the past but they stopped being a reliable professional tool a long vulgarized time ago.

These days Google serves up garbage search results for babies.

Brexiteers have nothing but disdain for the City and finance. They're a know-nothing movement unswayed by economic research and proudly ignorant concerning, among a myriad of hard truths, the realities of operating in the modern global economy.

They think with a simple wave of their plastic sovereignty wand, Britain will be magically restored to some fictional past where a dominant UK thrived in an economic self-sufficiency bubble. No banking sector or stock brokers required.

Good bloody luck with that, mates.

Professor Frink, Professor Frink. He'll make you laugh, he'll make you think. He likes to run and then the thing with the.. person...

> regardless of their technical expertise

Good luck with that. Trying to make one product powerful enough for the techies yet simple enough for the normies is the software equivalent of Napoleon attacking Russia.

> One thing I've learned about software in general is that I never want to be outside of the primary use case. If you're not using it the same way that the people building it do, it's going to be a pain to use, and your requests will be ignored.

While this might be true in general, one of the main advantages in choosing FOSS is that features used by a small subset of users are more likely to be kept than for proprietary software.

When a software package starts out, early-adopting power users build its popularity and help shape its growth ... until the package becomes so useful that it is now marketable to the masses. Then, for proprietary software at least, there's a strong incentive to streamline and remove anything the masses don't care about...which can alienate the same people who helped make their package great.

For FOSS, there's powerful motiviation to retain features that even only a handful of power users rely on -- lest that project be forked.

I can't remember the last time I've been feature-burned by a FOSS project. My feature-burn scars for proprietary software, however, are many -- and at least a few are quite deep.