So I can get bold at a cost of shift* to get the star.
Or I can do ESC enable-this-mode-option and then press a single key.
I'm struggling with this. If it's cheaper in keystrokes to type the codes inline why enable the mode?
This isn't a vi vs emacs hate thing, It's a key count efficiency thing. I don't see the motivation even if translated to minimum prefix TAB complete terms. Its like 20x more presses.
I don’t think TFA meant to suggest that everyone should upend their current practices for the emphasize function. But I can see someone who is less familiar with the myriad of ways to emphasize, or the markers which signify the emphasis, appreciating what it offers
Yes. I also believe this motivation but a counter argument was put to me by Mike Lesk in the mid 80s. Bell did serious experiments on library query systems and the casual helpful, verbose ones were only useful for a brief period in any library index users lifetime, they moved to the terse, harder to learn, efficient one as soon as they could.
So, it's a universal feature of Emacs all things glue in like this but the strong likelihood is power users use terse brief commands more, more effectively.
I use Emacs org mode a lot and the only M-x command I use frequently is the column deletion because I seem not to use it enough to learn the brief form, but do need to do columnar edit stuff.