YouTube has a Lot of great emacs content!

Read the built in documentation.

Work through the tutorial.

I’d start with traditional emacs key bindings and a rudimentary initialization file. As you get more comfortable, increase the complexity of your initialization file to solve a current need. I’d advise not thinking about learning emacs but think about using emacs instead. If you’re persistent, you’ll use it to solve a set of different problems (using myself as an example, I’ve started using emacs as a replacement for two usecases–text generation and automated search and replacement on a large number of files–that I typically solved with shell scripts).

Not wasting a huge amount of time screwing around with emacs requires discipline as it’s easy to screw around on things with little value (e.g. trying every theme you can find or searching for the perfect fix to something that only happens on startup) because it’s interesting. I’d plan on a little time for fun but avoid going overboard.

Welcome!

Try this one

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

After I got more familiar with Emacs I spent some time to walk through each chapter of the Emacs manual. Even if you think you know how to search and replace within Emacs, after reading the chapter about it you know even more.

And what is most often forgotten: Use the menu bar. You can find most of the basic commands and their shortcuts there.

I’m not really agreeing with much of what is here, and I say that as someone that recently learnt to use (and abuse) Emacs recently.

For starters, vanilla Emacs is just too raw to be useful (especially for coding), but Doom and Spacemacs I found to be too opinionated and basically felt like too much of a deviation from vanilla and like I had bought an off the shelf IDE.

Eventually I found Prelude, and that seemed to be a happy medium of being quite vanilla but still being ready to use for coding.

The major hurdle at the start was keybindings - but I had trained myself a bit by using the Emacs bindings in VS Code first.

I’m glad nobody is recommending garbage like doom emacs, evil and etc.
Just start from the tutorial start adding your keybindings to make your life easy.

I’m taking classes from Prot. He’s very clear, patient and very expert on the matter: you might find this as a possibility source to be considered.

https://protesilaos.com/coach/

Uncle Dave’s Emacs Playlist Is All You Need:

- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX2044Ew-UVVv31a0-Qn3dA6Sd_-NyA1n

Use menus. The key bindings is the Way, but also noh at all logicql in the beginning.

C-x C-c is life saver combo in the beginning.

EmacsConf 2023 just wrapped up, but you can watch the prerecorded talks here: https://emacsconf.org/2023/

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Start with vanilla Emacs. Slowly but surely you’ll grow your config to the point of … throw it away. And start again. Same story a few times and in the end, there you have it.

Learning emacs is a beautiful journey. I am learning it since 2003, and i think i am in the middle of the the travel. Dont stop if you fall. The road is long.

https://www.masteringemacs.org/

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