I am a newbie to emacs and Linux in general (started my linux journey 2 months ago) and want to learn emacs. Does anyone have good ressources to learn emacs as a beginner? Also should I use a distro like doom Emacs or should I do it from scratch
I wrote a website for beginners, focused on writing prose, not code
Work through the tutorial.
Uncle Dave’s Emacs Playlist Is All You Need:
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX2044Ew-UVVv31a0-Qn3dA6Sd_-NyA1n
YouTube has a Lot of great emacs content!
EmacsConf 2023 just wrapped up, but you can watch the prerecorded talks here: https://emacsconf.org/2023/
Do the internal tutorial. Just click on the link of the splash page
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 :)
The best way to learn it is to use it. Start with vanilla emacs and a project, and commit to using it. You’ll learn more by needing to figure out how to mark, copy, and paste than just reading about it.
Learn how to use the built-in help functions.
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.
Don’t use “distros” (doom and such) use the vanilla emacs. Do the tutorial and read the manual.
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.
Read the built in documentation.
If you don’t want to spend 20yrs to get better at Emacs, use a spaced repetition software like Anki to learn all the shortcuts. I use native Emacs keybindings because they are way easier to remember and compose well with a multitude of emacs packages without conflicts. Right now I can remember over 100 Emacs bindings. Once you remember many shortcuts they slowly become muscles memory just like learning to drive. At this phase, you don’t think about editing anymore, your fingers do the right thing just like a musician playing a piano. After this stage you get more and more greedier, you start making your own macros that do stuff you want coz lisp based syntax lets you do whatever you want with least effort compared to JavaScript,Lua or any other language.
Step 1 is memorising shortcuts, use anki to do it with least effort. It only takes 5-10 minutes a day.
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.