this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)
Emacs
313 readers
3 users here now
A community for the timeless and infinitely powerful editor. Want to see what Emacs is capable of?!
Get Emacs
Rules
- Posts should be emacs related
- Be kind please
- Yes, we already know: Google results for "emacs" and "vi" link to each other. We good.
Emacs Resources
Emacs Tutorials
- Beginner’s Guide to Emacs
- Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs
- How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners
Useful Emacs configuration files and distributions
Quick pain-saver tip
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I completely agree with this summary. Find something in your existing workflow that could do with improvement, and seek out a solution. For example: you want to jump quickly between windows, look up Ace Window; or, you want to jump quickly across the text visible on the screen, look up Avy; or, you want to jump quickly between files and text in your repository, look up Counsel.
Invest in a few well made frameworks, but only one at a time, and allow yourself to internalize their concepts and key bindings. It is helpful to write out the keybindings that you intend to memorize. A framework or package will often have dozens, but you will probably only ever commit to a handful. Review the list after a month or two, and you will likely find the ones that stick with you.
I have used Emacs exclusively since the early nineties, so I've seen whole frameworks come and go. I've also wasted a lot of time on some of them, e.g., Org Mode is something I swore off almost a decade ago. What I appreciate most about Emacs is that learning it has truly been an investment, since it has had incredible staying power and there's enough in the vanilla install that I can install the package on a new Linux box and immediately be productively editing files