This got long, but hopefully there is some good knowledge in here for you. Steve Yegge wrote some great starter posts on Emacs. He essentially inspired me to g

This got long, but hopefully there is some good knowledge in here for you. Steve Yegge wrote some great starter posts on Emacs. He essentially inspired me to get out and learn it. He provides some good starting defaults that you should use. You can Google for these. If you start Emacs and type C-h t, you'll get the tutorial, which is a helpful starting point. C-h in general is your friend and an entree into several kinds of help, like what keystroke bindings are currently active, what a built-in function does, what a keystroke does, etc. The Emacs Wiki is a great place to go and just click around for a while. On the front page is a section for the Emacs Newbie. The Nifty Tricks page alone could consume several weeks of learning. http://www.emacswiki.org http://www.emacswiki.org http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsNewbie http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsNewbie http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsNiftyTricks http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsNiftyTricks What really sold me on Emacs was M-x shell. I love having a terminal with functionally infinite history, with completions for any text I enter (not just files and programs, read about Hippie expand), where I can munge the output of a shell command in place or just search through it. M-x shell in combination with server-mode essentially replaced screen for me. server-mode allows you to run Emacs as a long-running server process that you can attach to with emacsclient. So your Emacs process might have uptime measured in months, and you just keep attaching to it from home or at work. I like ido-mode with fuzzy matching, which functions something like an awesome bar for your editing tabs (or "buffers" in Emacs lingo). Eventually, you may plateau in your knowledge and you might want to read the manual. It is written in small, digestible bits. You can skip around but it might help to read the first chapters first. It took me about a year to get to the point where it made sense to start eating the elephant. http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/emacs.html http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/emacs.html Last, you might want to investigate Emacs Lisp programming. Writing little programs in the native language of your text editor will make you drunk with power. Happy hacking!