Anybody who read it? Is it any good?
(I'm a Vim user, but have sometimes half-pondered the thought of getting into Emacs, (using evil-mode of course), for the org-mode & co)
(I'm a Vim user, but have sometimes half-pondered the thought of getting into Emacs, (using evil-mode of course), for the org-mode & co)
I have read the book and it is the best Emacs book I know of. Highly recommended.
1. Like you, I am coming from vim (or using vim bindings in any editor I use). evil-mode is great but the book is focused on vanilla emacs movements and text manipulation and so there's good chunk of the book devoted to that which wasn't applicable to me. 2. This is more of a nit, but I do get a general tone that the book sees having to use elisp as a kind of drawback. Maybe I'm reading too much into that, and it is certainly still the case that you will have to do a lot of configuration to get a setup that works for you. But for me my interest in lisp is part of what makes me interested in emacs so I wish it didn't shy away from it as much.
That said I still found it overall worthwhile for understanding the building blocks and terminology. Also now is a great time to play around with a fresh emacs install. The 29 release has a bunch of goodies that make it easier to build towards and IDE-like experience with many out-of-the box pieces. It comes with a language server (LSP) client, native tree-sitter integration, and a nice declarative package management system that doesn't require any third-party deps (though you can swap the underlying engine to a third-party one if you need the extra features)
I recommend you simply make an alphabetic list of various Emacs commands.
You will see the correspondence between many of the commands depending on the modifier (Ctrl, Alt, Ctrl-Alt, etc.) that is used.
Listing Control then Alt (Meta) we have: A - Beginning of Line, Beginning of Sentence; B - Back one Character, Back one Word; D - Delete Character, Delete Word; E - End of Line, End of Sentence; F - Forward one Character, Forward one Word.
and so on.
Most of the letters chosen are mnemonic so they are easy to remember.
Once you have memorised the standard Control and Alt letter combinations, plus a few more such as \, (space), and / and you will find the commands just "fit". They are "in your fingers".
They are also usable on the command-line, bash defaults to using Emacs editing commands as well.
Emacs is also extensively documented and highly discoverable - even within Emacs. There is a built-in tutorial (like vimtutor). And once you get past a few lessons using their info pages or website, you will have enough skill to pull up the documentation for all core features. The info pages are often books on their own right.
I personally never felt the need for a book. That said, I do recommend buying the book to support the author. Their articles on the masteringemacs website are pleasant and high quality stuff.