I know it's the internet and the standard assumpution is that what I wrote is a complaint.

But just to be clear, I don't find Emac's behavior annoying. I find it empowering. The idea that I might know what I am doing and be doing it seriously is refreshing. Even if I don't.

I get annoyed with the fact that I don't know Emacs better. But I love the fact that I can change that fact. I love that there's something else to learn about Emacs and that it's likely to be worth learning because it involves diving into an incredible piece of software as an object of design.

Well, I was mostly piling my own complaints on top of what you said. I also agree that Emacs is wonderful, and I agree that it's great how much power it gives us to reconfigure everything. However, that doesn't make it perfect. It's completely legitimate to point out flaws, whether they're actual bugs, subjective annoyances or hand-wavey project-wide things.

For example, I think that the Emacs community should embrace starter kits more when encouraging others to get started. Of course there's some truth to the "thrown in at the deep end" and "get to grips with the real, inner-workings" approaches, but at the same time the line has to be drawn somewhere; I doubt many would recommend new starters to compile Emacs themselves.

Still, Emacs is certainly not as scary as many make it out to be. This week I was helping out a Haskell programming class of CS students, where the instructions included setting up Emacs and installing haskell-mode (in Emacs 23, so they had to install the package manager first!). Out of a group of 60, only one struggled to do this, and it turned out to be because the sysadmin hadn't installed Emacs on the machine he was using ;)

The Emacs community embraces starter kits to the extent it makes sense to embrace starter kits. That extent is the extent to which people are willing to expend the energy to develop and maintain those configurations. My impression is that few people have the energy and will to make such projects a successful ongoing enterprise because in the end, pretending that Emacs is notepad.exe comes crashing down to the reality that Emacs is a power tool and even newbies are drawn to it for that reason. The bill for its learning curve comes through.

Do you have any other example of an Emacs application assuming it is the only thing running? I ask because I use Emacs a fair bit and don't think I've ever come across something like that.

Emacs is unfortunately still single-threaded at its core, so it indeed happens that some subpar code can hang the whole editor while waiting for some network requests to finish, or take down everything in a crash (but this happens extremely rarely; I think I had only a few random crashes on Windows in years of using Emacs).

TRAMP to me seems to be the worst offender here. If your connection is slow or you mistyped the domain you pretty much just have to wait for it to time out

C-g

I use emacs all day every day, and the only crashing problems I've had has been helm-projectile lagging and crashing if you start typing too fast after invoking it.

Otherwise it's rock solid.