Emacs keybindings for office users? How to get office users to switch to emacs?

I want to direct a bunch of people I know to use emacs to leverage the org-eco system. ​ Are there starterkits/modes that help with the keybindings? e.g. simplify them as much as possible, use the :sadface: gui defaults, etc.?

org-mode was what made me use Emacs more in the first place.. During the beginning, I was using the menus quite a lot.. I've got the menu- and the icon bar disabled nowadays, but for a start, it's quite ok. [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode) might help with the most common problems and after that, it's probably a question of proper motivation :D

Ah, yes, cua mode is a first step. I wonder how hard it would be to re/unbind most other stuff as well and always using M-x instead.

That's pretty much how I learn things.. I start by looking around what's available via M-x and only later will I learn the proper shortcut for it :D And unlike vi, I find it hard to be tangled up in something.. C-g gets you out of most weird situations, if you accidentally leave the minibuffer to cancel an action, you can always click it.. Another thing that really pushed me forward was using counsel-M-x instead of the default one, because it will show the shortcuts along with the function names.

Emacs supports a lot of "notepad"-like keybindings out of the box, actually. Like arrows, Home, End, selection with Shift, Ctrl/Shift-Insert etc.

I have found over the decades that this is a horse-to-water type situation. I mean, <diety> bless you if you can pull it off, but this sort of thing has never worked for me. I Am Not Good With People(tm) so that's likely a big part of it, but the most I'm willing to go now to avoid a kick in the ego's crotch is to just show them <tool> and how it makes me more productive, and then be willing to guide anyone who wants to learn. But they have to want it.

Will these folks mostly be first-time Emacs-ers and how are you planning to handle synchronization between those different workstations or will they all be using this setup for Personal note-taking? I've been thinking about this a bit and often end up on having to introducing git to the mix which is a tall order for engineering teams sometimes. How technical would your team be. Would Emacs + git be a productivity and happiness killer for your "org"? Curious to learn more but in either case I'd urge you to enter this challenge with a good doze of patience. 😅

You cant't, my friend. You can't. Just as an example of what's happening around the world: my University (I REPEAT: UNIVERSITY) is ready to drop emails IMAP and POP3 support from MS AZURE servers and keep only Office 365 protocols for all personnel

Gosh. The tooling situation is increasingly getting shittier left and right. A bunch of proprietary standards/file formats and unusable interfaces (graphical interfaces and shitty APIs) will be most of what we have to show as the output of our glorious information age.

>You cant't, my friend. You can't. This. In general people don't want better software, they want familiar (seemingly) easy to use software. Convincing people that 30 minutes spent learning something new will save 300 hours in a year is a fool's game. Makes no sense but there it is.

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To be fair, they already took a wrong turn whenever they started using MS stuff for their mails. Microsofts IMAP implementation is so broken that the only way of using it without getting sad all the time is pop3 style (i.e., copy mails to a local folder, and delete them on the server). Disabling pop3 also is something I can understand - while I always liked the protocols simplicity not enough people use it nowadays to warrant keeping it enabled on most setups, and the people who do use it can switch to imap without losing any functionality. I only have one mailserver left with pop3 for legacy reasons (setup goes back over two decades), all my newer ones only had imap from the beginning.

You can’t even convince *programmers* to switch to emacs unless they already want to. General office users won’t even change their email client without a fuss.

I totally agree with you my friend, but I still use Mutt on IMAP protocol (and Emacs via Postfix when I'm working with it) and I think is still a viable solution, but I will be forced to use outlook web app. I personalized them so much, including a random signature with a quote using a personalized Fortune strfile. How sad.

I'd check if davmail works with your universities policies. If not maybe the best solution might be to just forward all incoming mail to a sensible mail account. I have one customer where they also disabled everything, and I don't understand how companies can work with that shit. I miss half the emails sent to me nowadays.

What do you mean by “re/unbind most other stuff”? CUA is pretty smart about other bindings. Give them undo tree and they will start loving Emacs. About M-x, I use Helm. About anything else, I don’t think Office is a nice contender to Emacs in terms of keybindings.

Following the same way. Taking the lead in “let me share my desktop” is key. I recorded a few videos about Emacs, so they start like curious, I give ‘em a link and boom: let there be light.

No.

Evil path: Step 1. Make them use vim for awhile. Step 2. Say "OK, if you're that untutorable, fine!" Step 3. Replace vim with emacs. Step 4. Observe how happy the users are about emacs normality.

1. give them a out, look if they are open to it, don't try to force them on it. 2. tell them what emacs is and not is, tell them that it's NOT a editor but a lisp intepreter with many packages and everything/most is configurable, so if they don't like something they can change it. Aka as example if they don't like the keybindings. 3. Ask if they know markdown already, do they have a use for it? Do they already have some org-mode like files with content that would fit into that well? 4. if it's org-mode you could show it outside emacs first: [https://org-web.org/sample](https://org-web.org/sample) [https://organice.200ok.ch/sample](https://organice.200ok.ch/sample)

If you can convince people to use emacs, you might have a future as a cult leader.

I found CUA mode a hindrance to using emacs. There are _way_ too many clashes with the default keys and I spent more time working around them than simply learning the default ones. That said, the idea of imposing emacs on someone made me cringe. It took me three attempts to get over the learning hump with emacs and I persisted because smart people were telling me it was good. I got there and love it now, but I can’t imagine the pain of trying to convince someone who wasn’t motivated. IMHO, just let it go.

>If not maybe the best solution might be to just forward all incoming mail to a sensible mail account. I think that will do, it wsa my idea also. A gmail account should do the trick. I hope they don't complaint about "privacy".

Ah, those web layers are a good idea, thanks!

This is a part of my configuration which mimics Keybindings known from usual text editors (too lazy to translate the German comments into English): ;;; Speichern ohne nachzufragen ;;; (defun custom/save-dont-ask () (interactive) (save-buffer) 'no-confirm) ;;; Durchsuchen des gesamten Dokuments (wie STRG+F);;; (define-key isearch-mode-map [remap isearch-delete-char] 'isearch-del-char) (defadvice isearch-search (after isearch-no-fail activate) (unless isearch-success (ad-disable-advice 'isearch-search 'after 'isearch-no-fail) (ad-activate 'isearch-search) (isearch-repeat (if isearch-forward 'forward)) (ad-enable-advice 'isearch-search 'after 'isearch-no-fail) (ad-activate 'isearch-search))) ;;; Scrollen während man mit isearch sucht ;;; (setq isearch-allow-scroll t) ;;; Suchen und Ersetzen im gesamten Dokument (wie STRG+H) ;;; (defun my/replace-string (current-string replacing-string) (interactive "sString to be replaced: \nsString to replace with: ") (save-excursion (if (use-region-p) ; if a region is active (replace-string current-string replacing-string ; replace the current string nil (region-beginning) (region-end)) ; within that region (replace-string current-string replacing-string ; else replace the current string nil (point-min) (point-max))))) ; in the whole buffer ;;; Speichern, Kopieren, Einfügen, Ausschneiden, Lerezeile löscht markierten Text wie in Windows ;;; (transient-mark-mode 1) (cua-mode t) (setq cua-auto-tabify-rectangles nil) (setq cua-keep-region-after-copy t) (setq mouse-drag-and-drop-region t) ; Ausgewählter Text lässt sich an andere Stelle ziehen ;;; C-<del> und C-<backspace> überschreiben Zwischenablage nicht ;;; (defun delete-word (arg) "Kill characters forward until encountering the end of a word. With argument ARG, do this that many times." (interactive "p") (delete-region (point) (progn (forward-word arg) (point)))) (defun backward-delete-word (arg) "Kill characters backward until encountering the beginning of a word. With argument ARG, do this that many times." (interactive "p") (delete-word (- arg))) (setq org-support-shift-select t) ;;; S-<left> und S-<right> markieren Text wörterweise (wie in Word) ;;; (bind-key* (kbd "C-f") 'isearch-forward) (bind-key* (kbd "C-x C-h") 'my/replace-string) (bind-key* (kbd "C-s") 'custom/save-dont-ask) ; speichert wie in Word (bind-key* (kbd "C-a") 'mark-whole-buffer) ; wie STRG+A in Word (bind-key* (kbd "<escape>") 'keyboard-escape-quit) ; Escape funktioniert wie in Windows (bind-key* (kbd "C-<backspace>") 'backward-delete-word) (bind-key* (kbd "C-<delete>") 'delete-word) ;;; Strg +/- zum Vergrößern/verkleinern ;;; (bind-key* (kbd "C-+") 'text-scale-increase) (bind-key* (kbd "C--") 'text-scale-decrease)