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Comment by trominos | Hacker News Reader

Seems great.

Are there any similarly gentle intros to emacs?

    M-x help-with-tutorial

Which is Emacs keyboard shorthand for, "press Alt-x, let go of Alt, then type help-with-tutorial and press Enter".

If that doesn't work (depending on what Emacs thinks your Alt key is), you can also type Control-H, let go of Control, and then type t.

..............

........................

I thought David was kidding. Jesus.

Not at all. That's the Emacs crash course: How do you move by charcters/words/lines/sentences/paragraphs/function definitions/..., how do you open/save files, what does 'C-x M-c butterfly' mean, how do you browse the main help system, etc. It probably takes about half an hour to go through.

Emacs is largely self-documenting, but since it was written decades (and several OSs) ago, it's IMHO worth reading through the basics. For one thing, it tends to use different terminology than most people are familiar with.

:help Just to mention the same for Vim. :-)

F1 even works.

  % vimtutor

An alternative.

I'd say press F1 F1 and follow instructions on the screen.

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