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Comment by intranation | Hacker News Reader

The Emacs book was written in 2004 and is about Emacs 21.3. Current Emacs is 23.3, with 24.0 in pre-test.

I know things are relatively stable in Emacs world, but a fair bit has changed just from 23.x to 24.0.

Loads of cool new things, but not many changes in the areas that a introductory book would cover I think. Or am I wrong?

They've paid a lot of attention to defaults, pretty much for the exclusive benefit of newbies.

If it's any consolation, I found the Robbins vi book to be little better than adequate.

I learned emacs from the version of this book available in 1999. I don't think much of what I learned is hopelessly obsolete. Basics are basics.

I felt the book was a nice overview, both covering the basic terms and techniques and giving a tour of important features like dired and in-emacs shells. You'll want to augment by reading other online sources (there was no emacswiki in 1999, that I knew of) but the book is probably still worth the money. This is emacs. You'll appreciate having more than one tour guide, because the world is big and everyone knows one part better than others.

Do you have any suggestions for learning emacs? I know that that 23.3 manual is online, but I don't see anything for 24.0. Does it make sense to just use 23.3 and get used to that, then move to 24?

There's some HN discussion about the new release:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059909 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1181589

And another link I found helpful:

http://batsov.com/Emacs/2011/08/19/a-peek-at-emacs24.html

But yes, your plan is a good one. Start by running

  C-h t

to get the native tutorial, then ramp up from there. I'm afraid I don't know many good online tutorials as I work with Emacs power users, but Stack Overflow has always been quite helpful for learning Elisp.

I would suggest just getting emacs 24. If you are on OSX you can build the emacs head using homebrew. There's some cool stuff in 24 like the emacs package manager (package.el) etc.

Once you have emacs 24 ready to go, it's a good idea to take a look at the emacs starter kit: https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

There's also a pretty good peepcode screencast on emacs, its a bit old, but gives a good overview of a lot of the basics.

Once you feel like delving deeper, your best bet is to snoop around on emacswiki.org

This is fantastic, thank you

I'd recommend Aquamacs (which is integrated pretty well with OSX): http://aquamacs.org/

If you're on OSX, http://emacsformacosx.com/builds is easier to deal with than homebrew.

Besides the inline manual that emacs has in itself. I recommend you to start using the Emacs Starter Kit [1].

Try to read the source and understand what it's doing. You will learn how to configure emacs, and the basics of elisp.

[1] https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

I would just get _some_ version of Emacs and spend an hour with it. The core set of commands is what you want to learn. You don't care about any of the eye candy they've added in the last 20 years. Seriously. Save the "superior LISP session auto yanking" nonsense until you're a power user.

Emacs (and most of the Emacs clones) come with a tutorial. It's pretty decent.

After a while you may find yourself feeling bad that you've not done any customization. "Argh," you say, "This is supposed to be a customizable editor. I should start customizing it so that I can realize the awesome power of this fully operational editor!" No worries. I'm guessing that most Emacs users really don't change much. For C hacking or writing I usually just tweak some settings, add a few macros and I'm good to go. Most of my customizations are turning /off/ things that other folks thought were good features. No names, now. :)

tl;dr; Don't worry about the new shiny. There's plenty to learn before you get there.

[emacs user since 1979]

Come on now, the builtin Emacs tutorial is atrocious. It tries to teach you the most basic stuff, like what the CTRL key looks like or how to hit arrow keys. Do you really think anyone who does not know the CTRL key would pick up Emacs?

Honestly, at least one of my attempts to get into Emacs died because of disgust of tutorial. It could teach the very same content without being that condescending and outdated. I loathe it.

Funny enough, the gnu.org guided tour through Emacs is really good! Just rewrite the tutorial in a slightly more modern style. I am sure this would increase Emacs adoption quite significantly.

Well that's interesting; I started using emacs around 1986 or so, and the first thing I did was go thru the tutorial; I don't remember it being overly basic at all.

Alright. It took me a few minutes to actually find a suitable version of Emacs for Windows. Then it took me another minute or so to find the English tutorial.

As I quickly scan through the tutorial:

The tutorial assumes I am using a terminal. To be fair, I might. However, it specifically assumes that I am using a terminal from the 1980s. However, I actually have working arrow keys, a mouse and an ALT key. Not META or EDIT. This is what PCs, Linuxes and Macs have converged on. ALT keys, arrow keys and mouses.

Quote: "there should be a tall rectangular area called a scroll bar on one side of the Emacs window...", "Try pressing the middle button at the top of the highlighted area within the scroll bar. This should scroll the text to a position determined by how high or low you click". And so on. First off, it is left mouse, not middle mouse. Then, some of the described behaviors are plain wrong on a modern Windows system (or Mac or Linux for the matter). But really, does Emacs have to explain what a scrollbar is? Honestly?

Then there is stuff like "when saving is finished...". Saving files does not take time any more. Especially not for novices, who are less likely to open several megs of log files.

Quote: "If you are using a graphical display that supports multiple applications in parallel...". What does Emacs think? That I am using Emacs on an iPhone, probably. It has been a really long time since I have seen a "graphical system" that did not support multiple applications in parallel.

Oh well. This should give you an idea. Apart from that the tutorial is not that bad. Just pretty boring. For what it's worth, I remember having quite a bit of fun doing the Vim tutorial, while the Emacs tutorial left me bored and confused. But maybe that has other reasons than the objective quality of the tutorials.

I learned a lot of things using apropos-command (after I got comfortable with basic editing.) When I found myself thinking "it would be cool if emacs did X", I just tried C-h a X Ret to see if there is a function for it. Emacs also tells you to which key sequence the function is bound (if any.)

Exploring Emacs that way is like browsing Wikipedia going from article from article: you don't follow a predetermined itinerary but end up learning a lot along the way.

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