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
https://www.masteringemacs.org/
The author posts on this subreddit.
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.
EmacsConf 2023 just wrapped up, but you can watch the prerecorded talks here: https://emacsconf.org/2023/
YouTube has a Lot of great emacs content!
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).
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 found this guide helpful.
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.
Learn how to use the built-in help functions.
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
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 :)
Do the internal tutorial. Just click on the link of the splash page
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.