If it's only about the "editor" part of Emacs then I would recommend starting with an Emacs-like editor mg[1]. It's clean, small and has nice manpage that I feel wouldn't overwhelm newcomers. It also has some of the basic commands helpful for programming.
Learning Emacs, any tips or tricks, best tutorial?
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: Learning Emacs, any tips or tricks, best tutorial?
#12I dont have a tutorial to offer you, but here's what made semi-comfortable with emacs:
- install the emacs starter kit [0] as it's much user friendly than the raw emacs
- learn the most used shortcuts (C-w to cut, M-w to copy, C-Y to yank (paste), C-x C-s to save, C-x C-f to open a file, C-k to kill a text, C-a to go at the start of a line and C-e to go at the end, etc.)
- try to use emacs for everything and slowly get more and more comfortable at it.
Re: Learning Emacs, any tips or tricks, best tutorial?
#13 (menu-bar-mode nil)
(tool-bar-mode nil)
Re: Learning Emacs, any tips or tricks, best tutorial?
#14Hello, as someone who shied away from regular IDEs to use Emacs for programming work, I would recommend that you start setting things up for some very specific need. As it was already pointed out, Emacs is huge and you will never stop learning it. Therefore, if your main line of work implies writing Java code, I would recommend you look for some tutorials that are particularly aimed at that, and build on those as you…
This absolutely, best way to learn is to have a specific goal in mind. I got started with emacs because I was using an IDE called RStudio ( http://www.rstudio.com/ ) which I really liked, and I wanted something similar for python but couldn't find anything to suit my needs. I set out to recreate the functionality of RStudio in emacs and have (largely) succeeded. It took a lot of mucking around but I really learned my…
Well done to have replicated RStudio for pyhton on Emacs. I am interested by that, do you have the ELisp code somewhere? Thanks!
Re: Learning Emacs, any tips or tricks, best tutorial?
#15Hey there,
I used to Vim too, and started using Emacs since I started doing a lot of Clojure development. Since then, I have not looked back. The power and flexibility of Emacs is second to almost none. Just the other day, I was working on a Latex file, and I had a buffer open with a pdf viewer right next to my tex file, that would update as soon as I saved changes to my tex file. And the community has done almost everything you can think of already. If not, just write it yourself!
To get started, I would highly recommend using Emacs Prelude: https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude It's incredibly useful and user friendly, and makes your Emacs all the more powerful. This is a good intro article to it: http://batsov.com/prelude/
The other blog that I find useful even as a fairly seasoned Emacs user is http://www.masteringemacs.org/ It has some great guides and tutorials for beginners too.
Re: Learning Emacs, any tips or tricks, best tutorial?
#16Hello, as someone who shied away from regular IDEs to use Emacs for programming work, I would recommend that you start setting things up for some very specific need. As it was already pointed out, Emacs is huge and you will never stop learning it. Therefore, if your main line of work implies writing Java code, I would recommend you look for some tutorials that are particularly aimed at that, and build on those as you…
Steve Yegge's effective emacs is definitely worth a read. It helped me get used to emacs without contracting RSI :) FWIW, I'm bilingual - I use Vim to write code and emacs to write in English.
Re: Learning Emacs, any tips or tricks, best tutorial?
#17You didn't say what operating system you are using. When I 'got into' emacs it was with the OS X-ish version, Aquamacs.
Which _is_ emacs, but with Mac friendly bits. At first I used it simply as a replacement for Textmate, then later got into things like TRAMP, and org-mode.
I didn't need a guide or a how-to. Every so often I would wonder 'I wonder if Emacs can do this, or that', google it, and learn that it could.
Re: Learning Emacs, any tips or tricks, best tutorial?
#18some bite sized emacs tips http://rawsyntax.com/blog/categories/learn-emacs/
and a great introduction to setting up emacs http://batsov.com/articles/2012/10/14/emacs-on-osx/
posts on various emacs topics http://www.masteringemacs.org/