With modern autocomplete for commands, discovering commands in emacs has never been easier. "M-x sort" will show you all fuzzy completions of that commands basically instantly.
The flow you just mentioned I think looks nigh identical.
Even the current version of Emacs doesn't do fuzzy completion for M-x commands, just start-of-token completion; out of the box the completion is a little basic. I know there are packages which make this a lot better, but you have to know about the packages. :)
Even so, the "sort lines" example works well with even the out-of-the-box completion. But, Emacs sometimes has its own language for things. If I didn't know the keyboard commands for "make region uppercase" and "make region lowercase" (which in fact I'd forgotten, although they're pretty trivial), then as far as I could tell the best way I could find them would be: Google. Inside Emacs, I could type "M-x up" and get the correct "upcase-region", but if I'd typed "M-x upp", I'd be out of luck. And Emacs-ese for "lowercase" is "downcase"; I wouldn't have guessed that at all!
So I'm not sure the flow looks nigh identical for that many cases like this. The way I remember learning Emacs basics many years ago was actually through menus. Looking at Emacs's menus now, in v27.2, they're...kind of eclectic? The basics are there, but a lot, well, isn't. BBEdit is admittedly somewhat at the other extreme, with possibly just too damn much in its menus, but that does make a lot of its functionality very easily discoverable.
At any rate, I should be clear that I think this is a mild knock against Emacs; I bounce off it in part because of this relative lack of discoverability, and also because it just seems like it takes a lot of effort relative to most other editors to set up comfortably. The flip side of that is that, as the "Lock-In Effect" article notes, once you do have it set up the way you like it, you are probably never going to have any motivation to switch. That is absolutely not a knock -- it's configurable and extensible in a way nothing else is.
> Even the current version of Emacs doesn't do fuzzy completion for M-x commands, just start-of-token completion; out of the box the completion is a little basic. I know there are packages which make this a lot better, but you have to know about the packages. :)
This is not quite true.
The minibuffer, which is what vanilla Emacs uses for M-x command completion, has a set of completion styles, ordered by preference. You can find the full set of completion categories supported by Emacs in the variable completion-styles-alist. Among those is one called flex, which allows for full fuzzy matching between provided tokens.
This is not a default minibuffer completion style, but it provided without additional packages. One would add it by adding it to the list of completion styles used by the minibuffer as specified by the variable completion-styles. I recommend trying it out.
Interesting! It still doesn't quite shake my suspicion that the best documentation for Emacs is "find somebody else who knows more about Emacs than you do," but to be fair that's not unique to Emacs. :)
Honestly, I wouldn't have been able to tell you this two weeks ago. I know all this now because completions in a language I don't normally use felt off somehow, and figuring out the solution involved going deep on how Emacs handles completions. That ended up not being relevant to the root cause, which was a change in Doom causing snippets to be overvalued in LSP completion, but at least I know a lot more about vanilla completion methods now!
This is a helpful tip, but I feel like it kinda reinforces the broader point about emacs's lack of discoverability. I've been using it for years and wasn't aware of this feature until today.
This is how I've discovered most things outside of just reading the documentation (and usually I go to the documentation once I find it). It's also helpful that the info pages in emacs are also searchable with:
M-x info-apropos some-string
Both are kind of firehoses, but C-s inside the resulting buffer can usually narrow it down pretty quickly.
I'd like to know what other editors have a discovery system like this built-in.
I'll second this. Take a look at Vertico [1] and Consult [2] which really improve discoverability. Other nice packages (links found on the Vertico page) include Marginalia and Orderless.
The flow you just mentioned I think looks nigh identical.