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.

Work through the tutorial.

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 :)

The best way to learn it is to use it. Start with vanilla emacs and a project, and commit to using it. You’ll learn more by needing to figure out how to mark, copy, and paste than just reading about it.

emacs is a hard to learn because you need context to understand anything from a tutorial, which isn’t intuitive unless you use emacs, but to start using emacs you won’t get anywhere without some kind of guidance, which usually comes in the form of a tutorial.

it’s a ‘the chicken or the egg’ sort of problem. my recommendation is doing both. start using emacs exclusively as your full-time text editor unless you absolutely need to use something else to meet a deadline, and read through a tutorial or manual in your spare time. it’s hard at first, there isn’t really any way around it, but after a couple weeks of powering through it it gets easier. having the cheatsheet open on the side helps.

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

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

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

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.

I’d start with traditional emacs key bindings and a rudimentary initialization file. As you get more comfortable, increase the complexity of your initialization file to solve a current need. I’d advise not thinking about learning emacs but think about using emacs instead. If you’re persistent, you’ll use it to solve a set of different problems (using myself as an example, I’ve started using emacs as a replacement for two usecases–text generation and automated search and replacement on a large number of files–that I typically solved with shell scripts).

Not wasting a huge amount of time screwing around with emacs requires discipline as it’s easy to screw around on things with little value (e.g. trying every theme you can find or searching for the perfect fix to something that only happens on startup) because it’s interesting. I’d plan on a little time for fun but avoid going overboard.

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

EmacsConf 2023 just wrapped up, but you can watch the prerecorded talks here: https://emacsconf.org/2023/

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.

https://www.masteringemacs.org/

The author posts on this subreddit.

YouTube has a Lot of great emacs content!

I’m glad nobody is recommending garbage like doom emacs, evil and etc.
Just start from the tutorial start adding your keybindings to make your life easy.