I wrote a website for beginners, focused on writing prose, not code

https://lucidmanager.org/tags/emacs/

Learning emacs is a beautiful journey. I am learning it since 2003, and i think i am in the middle of the the travel. Dont stop if you fall. The road is long.

I’m pretty new to emacs too, the best tip I can give you is to start from “raw” emacs, make your own config.

Read Docs, look into others config (do not copy paste), watch systemcrafters tutorial video series.

Atm my emacs config is part of my workflow, I’m pretty happy with it.

https://www.masteringemacs.org/

The author posts on this subreddit.

patience

people who used emacs for 20 years still learn some stuff :)

join irc, or mastodon or any place to chat with people, it helps getting some things faster

watch emacsrocks, videos from a few years ago but excellent ratio between short demo and long term insight :)

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap#LearningEmacs

That is, just go to Emacs Wiki. The very first heading after How to use this site is Learning About Emacs.

There you’ll find lots of suggestions from Emacs users, new and veteran (including probably all or most suggestions you’ll find here). Anyone can add their suggestions there (like here, but all in a single place).

Read the built in documentation.

Do the internal tutorial. Just click on the link of the splash page

I’m not really agreeing with much of what is here, and I say that as someone that recently learnt to use (and abuse) Emacs recently.

For starters, vanilla Emacs is just too raw to be useful (especially for coding), but Doom and Spacemacs I found to be too opinionated and basically felt like too much of a deviation from vanilla and like I had bought an off the shelf IDE.

Eventually I found Prelude, and that seemed to be a happy medium of being quite vanilla but still being ready to use for coding.

The major hurdle at the start was keybindings - but I had trained myself a bit by using the Emacs bindings in VS Code first.

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YouTube has a Lot of great emacs content!

Don’t use “distros” (doom and such) use the vanilla emacs. Do the tutorial and read the manual.

Welcome!

Try this one

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

After I got more familiar with Emacs I spent some time to walk through each chapter of the Emacs manual. Even if you think you know how to search and replace within Emacs, after reading the chapter about it you know even more.

And what is most often forgotten: Use the menu bar. You can find most of the basic commands and their shortcuts there.

Start with vanilla Emacs. Slowly but surely you’ll grow your config to the point of … throw it away. And start again. Same story a few times and in the end, there you have it.

Work through the tutorial.