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I'm learning Emacs right now as a first time hobbyist. Keep doing the GNU tutorial or jump right in to DT's Doom tutorial? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I felt clunky doing NVIM and could never remember hotkeys for once a week -ish in-situ functional learning. Like I jump in FreeCAD for a few days, come back, and I can't recall a hotkey combo I only used once.

I think I can use Emacs lisp for some actual project goals with AI and other microcontroller projects involving FORTH, that I've never been able to figure out, and code complexity management issues I've never overcome. I still want the menu bar and am really unsure if the evil key bindings are for me. I would probably find it useful if I knew the vim bindings in situations like OpenWRT with busybox only, but it was the extreme complexity of navigating nvim help and key bindings that I found so useless to learn in-situ. Help me navigate this please. I'm being indecisive in a bad way about how to make this pretty, and get it configured.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

I am roughly in the same boat. But I was a bit familiar with vim bindings hence I went the doom route.

If you are starting fresh with emacs, then I'd recommend just going with the standard key bindings. System crafters have an excellent series on YouTube. Also, Mastering Emacs is a resource I cannot recommend enough. The website and the book are packed with all sorts of neat stuff. I also remember coming across something called Uncle Dave's emacs series on YouTube

If you don't want to start with plain jane vanilla emacs, there's Purcell's emacs.d repository on github.

Emacs wiki is also a very excellent source and has some other community recommended starter kits.

But all this aside, in general, I'd recommend to pick a couple resources that resonate with you and stick with it. The more you play, the better your intuition will develop and you'll start figuring out stuff on your own, trust me. The strongest advice I can give you is to not be overwhelmed and try to learn everything at once

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Thankfully, with a modern minibuffer UI package (Ivy or Vertico, for example), we don't need to remember arcane key bindings to run rarely used commands. To run such command, just run M-x and enter a substring of the command name. This video (posted here months ago) explains this topic very well.

For Emacs's help system (Info), I recommend to try C-h R info.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I recommend Mastering Emacs as a book. Sacha Chua’s page is an embarrassment of riches:

https://sachachua.com/blog/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Thanks for the reference. I saw Derek Taylor's (YT Distro Tube) intro to Doom emacs. He used a .org configuration file. Sacha seems to make several references to Org stuff. Is Org the basis of this page: https://sachachua.com/dotemacs/index.html

I like how she has every modification broken down with the sources of the code. I'm trying to avoid getting lost in the weeds be searching for this instead of simply asking. I really need something like this level of organization from the beginning.