patience

people who used emacs for 20 years still learn some stuff :)

join irc, or mastodon or any place to chat with people, it helps getting some things faster

watch emacsrocks, videos from a few years ago but excellent ratio between short demo and long term insight :)

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap#LearningEmacs

That is, just go to Emacs Wiki. The very first heading after How to use this site is Learning About Emacs.

There you’ll find lots of suggestions from Emacs users, new and veteran (including probably all or most suggestions you’ll find here). Anyone can add their suggestions there (like here, but all in a single place).

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

emacs is a hard to learn because you need context to understand anything from a tutorial, which isn’t intuitive unless you use emacs, but to start using emacs you won’t get anywhere without some kind of guidance, which usually comes in the form of a tutorial.

it’s a ‘the chicken or the egg’ sort of problem. my recommendation is doing both. start using emacs exclusively as your full-time text editor unless you absolutely need to use something else to meet a deadline, and read through a tutorial or manual in your spare time. it’s hard at first, there isn’t really any way around it, but after a couple weeks of powering through it it gets easier. having the cheatsheet open on the side helps.

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/

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 pretty new to emacs too, the best tip I can give you is to start from “raw” emacs, make your own config.

Read Docs, look into others config (do not copy paste), watch systemcrafters tutorial video series.

Atm my emacs config is part of my workflow, I’m pretty happy with it.

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.

I wrote a website for beginners, focused on writing prose, not code

https://lucidmanager.org/tags/emacs/

Uncle Dave’s Emacs Playlist Is All You Need:

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

Read the built in documentation.

https://www.masteringemacs.org/

The author posts on this subreddit.

YouTube has a Lot of great emacs content!

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.

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.