I felt like that when I started using Emacs, about 25 years ago. It turned out to be worth it, though.

Emacs has its own tutorial (Help -> tutorial from the menus), which is a pretty good introduction. Learning to get help from Emacs itself is a bit of a learning curve, but really beneficial.

Learning to the use the help tools properly was something I didn't get around to for years, but I wish I had sooner.

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massysett 3 days ago | parent [-]

Emacs says it is “self-documenting.”

Years ago it was remarkable for software to have docs built-in as Emacs does.

Then for many years it was standard for software to have help files, and it seemed anachronistic for Emacs to loudly proclaim it is self-documenting.

Now in the Web and LLM age, much software doesn’t even try to have built-in help or even much documentation, and it’s again remarkable that Emacs is self-documenting, especially the part of Emacs that users can program.

	▲	mschaef 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Then for many years it was standard for software to have help files, and it seemed anachronistic for Emacs to loudly proclaim it is self-documenting. Emacs' notion of self documentation refers to something slightly different than the fact it has online help files. The help facilities can query the Lisp runtime for things like functions and keybindings. These update dynamically as the system is reconfigured. The result is something that isn't quite as cleanly presented as an online help document, but has the benefit of being deeply integrated into how the system is actually configured to behave at the moment. Very cool, and very much dependent on the open source nature of emacs.