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Comment by mrspeaker | Hacker News Reader

The hardest thing about getting started with emacs is finding information about getting started with emacs. You get the "learn emacs in 10 minute" guides that show you how to open a file, and move up a line, and then after that everything goes off a cliff into installing packages and writing lisp.

It's hard to get a sense for the "overview" of what emacs is about - what you should learn first, how to customize your setup, and where you should go next. It feels like walking in to a party full of really really really smart strangers.

Like a party full of smart strangers, once you get going it's fine... but most people don't stick around that long.

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I learned Emacs last year from the O'Reilly book, "Learning GNU Emacs" - http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Emacs-Third-Debra-Cameron/dp/...

It's an excellent reference and introduction. I also blindly followed Steve Yegge's advice here too, which turned out to be great: http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

One great source of Emacs knowledge: http://www.emacswiki.org/

I'm sure there are other info sources, but the wiki has proven to be incredibly helpful for me over the years.

I found that Meet Emacs from the PeepCode series was pretty good, and takes you a bit further than just the absolute basics. He also has a nice fork of emacs-starter-kit on Github.

http://peepcode.com/products/meet-emacs

One way is to commit to using emacs for everything, now, and then slowly 'dig your way out'.

That is how I had to start. I just decided I would use it and be completely overwhelmed for a couple weeks. It also helps if you have a proficient Emacs use sitting nearby that so that you can constantly ask how do things.

This is how I learned Emacs, LaTeX and Linux. It works, but only if you enjoy the process of everything being broken always.

I learned Emacs about 7 months ago. I would say that spending a little bit of time experimenting everyday with it is probably the way to learn new functionality. But I think learning Elisp definitely improved my usage of Emacs because it lets you understand why Emacs does what it does.

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