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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been wanting to learn Emacs for 20 years. Is now finally the time?

Emacs is a fun long-term ride. A gift of sorts that keeps on giving... and by that, I mean no matter how experienced you are, you'll continue learning something new at all times. I often write about things I discover or build myself at https://xenodium.com.

https://planet.emacslife.com is a great aggregator. https://reddit.com/r/emacs is handy too. https://www.youtube.com/c/SystemCrafters is an awesome channel. https://emacsrocks.com has some awesome demos. https://emacsrocks.com/e13.html is one of my all-time favorites (watch until the end, has a worthy finale).

Get yourself a copy of „Mastering Emacs“ and jump straight in. Learning by doing. Turns out you don’t actually need to install a lot of packages these days to get started. Use js2-mode and/or web-mode (?) worked great with React projects with me together with „compile mode“ („C-c C-l“) built-in) running build and tests in package.json for you. Later you can add lsp-mode or eglot if you really need to.

Once you‘re comfortable with installing packages using Emacs‘ UI try watching the „Emacs from scratch“ series on YouTube and familiarize yourself with „use-package.el“ to build a clean, version controlled custom config.

If you do a lot of technical writing org-mode.el is pretty cool and also built-in. I am using it for live coding sessions.

This is great, thanks. I’ve used Emacs since 1988 but feel like a complete newb as it’s crazy hard to keep up with the development and much of what google will turn up is seems out of data already.

I love emacs, but I really wish the out-of-the-box experience was better (eg. IIUC, even the default package repository is known obsolete, so why is it still the default?)

The thing is that you can learn it very incrementally. I've been using it for years and don't know more than a tiny bit. My knowledge of elisp is abysmal. But, you get to learn how to add little things to your config here and there when you find something worth trying or improving.

Meanwhile I recommend just learning the vanilla defaults as best as possible. As long as you know how to open files, save things, switch between buffers, and quit, you're kind of good to go as far as immediate usability goes. Eventually you learn a few more key bindings to make navigation easier and faster, how to use macros, shell commands, etc. But you can learn these things on an as-needed basis.

Agreed. This is really good advice.

One of the offputting things about emacs is the enthusiasm directed to beginners to customize, pick a "distro" and basically overwhelm people when starting. It's a shame because what's wrong with enthusiasm?

But you can start using emacs with a handful of commands. Just typing puts characters into your buffer; c-f goes forward a character, c-b back a character, c-p goes the previous line, c-n goes to the next. c-x c-s saves the buffer into a file while c-x c-f finds a file by name and makes a buffer containing its contents. These commands have existed since I started using Emacs about 45 years ago!

Emacs is full of help. Press c-h for help -- it will prompt you for what you want help on. Every keystroke, every command, even "how did I get here" is in your help.

Over time you'll learn more commands, perhaps put something in your init file...and eventually it will be like a comfortable glove designed to fit your hands (which will stay on the keyboard, right?)

I get this. But on the other hand, there is a reason people customize Emacs, both by writing elisp, and loading packages. Vanilla emacs is usable, but its really not great, from a usability perspective. So the endless recommendations on what you should do to start.

A lot like a minimal Linux distro. Both scratch the itch of "I wish I could do this when that happens."

Yeah, you can do what I did: open Emacs, see "help" in the menubar (best thing since sliced bread), click it, click "tutorial", and we're off to the races.

honestly i tried the vanilla default many time to start with and it was the reason I waited so long to adopt emacs.

Since I tried Doom Emacs, I am really enjoying the experience, and it has seriously improved my workflow.

Now I can gradually learn things, improve my lisp, or try new work flows, etc.

Pre made distribution are a real improvement to the emacs ecosystem.

I've been using Emacs the way most people use Notepad++, just for quick text edits. Been doing that since the 1990s. The other thing I use Emacs for is the regular expression modes for search and replace. Unlike Notepad++ Emacs is available on most systems.

The on thing I would caution is Emacs creates backup files that can clutter. I find it is worth creating a dedicated back up folder. This does require configuration and there are tutorials on Youtube for this. I'd say about once or twice per year the backup files on every save have saved my bacon.

Finally, I prefer Emacs key binds to vi modes but that's just personal taste.

I put the question to the Emacs magic eight ball (https://github.com/RyanMatlock/eight-ball) and the answer was yes!

Yes, with caveats. Give yourself a goal you want to accomplish in Emacs -- just one -- and then start with that. Do not try to overload your learning by doing everything in Emacs from day one.

I don’t particularly know why this would motivate you to learn it. Yes you can use Lisp in Emacs - I frequently use it just to do math using Polish notation. But even though I know how to write Lisp, and have written my own functions, I rarely use it.

Yes.

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