3 ms·

In Emacs, press Control-h, let go of Control, and press t. That starts the tutorial, which will probably take about half an hour. After working through that, s

In Emacs, press Control-h, let go of Control, and press t. That starts the tutorial, which will probably take about half an hour. After working through that, some combination of reading the Emacs Wiki (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki) and a recent edition of _Learning Gnu Emacs_ will get you off to a good start. Getting really effective with Emacs takes a while (probably at least a month), but it is very deliberately designed to be keep growing with you. If you come to prefer it for editing, you can bundle together your config files and extensions and run Emacs on all the major OSs. It becomes its own extensible environment, much like Firefox with its extensions. (This is why the time spent learning it pays off.)

jrockway 18y ago
In Emacs, press Control-h, let go of Control, and press t. That starts the tutorial, which will probably take about half an hour. IMHO, the tutorial is useless. It spends too much time on C-p and C-n and not enough time on anything useful. I recommend reading the Info documentation. It is very well written and very complete. You should also read the Elisp reference manual; having an understanding of the internals is helpful even if you don't intend to program emacs.
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  I definitely agree about the Info documentation (I forgot to include that), but I think the tutorial is still worth doing: it covers the extreme basics using Emacs's terminology. It's hard to figure out how to do some things in Emacs via the info pages (or apropos, emacswiki, etc.) without knowing that, for example, each pane inside the Emacs window is called a "window" (Emacs calls the main window(s) "frames"). Also, it covers some conceptual things upfront, like how C-f is forward-char but M-f is forward-word, and that M-somekey is often a more abstract version of C-somekey. (Also, how to read the "C-x M-c butterfly" style keyboard shortcuts in the first place.) A lot of the things it covers ("C-x C-s is save") are pretty basic, but it tries to introduce some of Emacs's cultural/design quirks, which are probably what really trip up a lot of people.

jrockway 18y ago

In Emacs, press Control-h, let go of Control, and press t. That starts the tutorial, which will probably take about half an hour. IMHO, the tutorial is useless. It spends too much time on C-p and C-n and not enough time on anything useful. I recommend reading the Info documentation. It is very well written and very complete. You should also read the Elisp reference manual; having an understanding of the internals is helpful even if you don't intend to program emacs.

silentbicycle 18y ago
I definitely agree about the Info documentation (I forgot to include that), but I think the tutorial is still worth doing: it covers the extreme basics using Emacs's terminology. It's hard to figure out how to do some things in Emacs via the info pages (or apropos, emacswiki, etc.) without knowing that, for example, each pane inside the Emacs window is called a "window" (Emacs calls the main window(s) "frames"). Also, it covers some conceptual things upfront, like how C-f is forward-char but M-f is forward-word, and that M-somekey is often a more abstract version of C-somekey. (Also, how to read the "C-x M-c butterfly" style keyboard shortcuts in the first place.) A lot of the things it covers ("C-x C-s is save") are pretty basic, but it tries to introduce some of Emacs's cultural/design quirks, which are probably what really trip up a lot of people.