30 years of Emacs and 'I still don't understand Dired': the discoverability problem, in one thread
A post showcases 20+ stock Emacs commands most users never find — ruler-mode, compare-windows, turning your keystroke history into a macro. Then a famous longtime user admits the actual problem isn't hidden features. It's that things break.
The author, who also wrote the popular gptel package, frames Emacs as having a discoverability problem he's chipping at 'one demo at a time.' The built-ins are genuinely useful and genuinely buried.
The top reply reframes the whole premise: the issue was never finding features, it's keeping a large config stable across package updates. The fix people actually want is a good out-of-the-box experience, not another blog post.
A tour of the buried built-ins
Even more batteries included with Emacs, by Karthik Chikmagalur (also author of the popular gptel package), is the third in a series with a clear thesis: "Emacs features have a discoverability problem, and we're chipping away at it one demo at a time." It walks through 20+ stock commands most users never stumble onto.
The standouts are the kind of thing you wish you'd known years ago: compare-windows for lightweight diffing, ruler-mode, scroll-all-mode, dictionary-tooltip-mode, and kmacro-edit-lossage, which turns your recent keystroke history into an editable macro. One reader captured the experience exactly: "TIL about ruler-mode; now I can delete my own half-assed implementation" — and then found a note from his past self already recommending compare-windows.
"I still don't understand Dired"
The most-upvoted reply came from one of HN's most recognizable Emacs veterans, and it was a confession:
"I have been using Emacs since 1994 (Lucid!) and I still don't understand Dired." — tptacek
Thirty years in, still lost in the file manager — which quietly validates the author's whole discoverability thesis even as the rest of the thread argued the diagnosis is wrong.
The real complaint: it's not discoverability, it's stability
The sharpest pushback relocated the problem entirely.
"In my experience it's not a discoverability problem at all. Not even a little bit… The issue with emacs is that it's difficult to create large [configs] stable between different combinations of packages." — a 15-year Emacs user now part-time on VSCode
A widely-followed engineer took it to the adoption level: for most people the editor is a means to an end, so the only way to "make a dent" is a great out-of-the-box experience like Doom or Spacemacs provide — "this also means ditching the 'vanilla Emacs only' snobbery." The counter-testimony came from a Doom user reporting years of stability, arguing the slower-moving ecosystem is exactly what keeps it from breaking the way Neovim's does.
Demos fix the wrong layer
The post is a delight and the commands are real wins. But the thread's center of gravity is a polite disagreement with its author: the barrier keeping people off Emacs in 2026 isn't that ruler-mode is hidden — it's that assembling and maintaining a working setup is a project in itself. When a 30-year user still doesn't get Dired, the answer probably isn't one more demo. It's defaults good enough that you never needed the demo.
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