Month 2008.01

How to Get Started Learning Emacs

I do realize that I'm probably quite biased on the topic of editors, but be that as it may, Emacs is simply the best editor, IDE, environment, platform, lifestyle, etc. there is. And it's high time you learned how to use it.

First a quick aside… I used vi and vim for 10 years or so before I finally decided to bite the bullet and take the time to learn Emacs. It probably took me 6 months of playing with Emacs to really get comfortable with it. Hopefully these suggestions will help lessen that amount of time for others.

I'm assuming that you can figure out how to find and install Emacs for your system. You may read how to obtain Emacs from the GNU Emacs site.

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Here are some good sites for more information about Emacs:

• http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
• http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-intro/emacs-lisp-intro.html
• http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/emacs.html
• http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/elisp.html
• http://www.emacswiki.org/
• http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsNiftyTricks
• http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs
• http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/sje30/emacs/ell.html

The problem with the GNU coding standards is they ASSUME that everyone in the world uses emacs. If that were the case, free software would die because we would all have wrist problems like RMS by now and no longer be able to code.

– Knghtbrd