The best thing (IMO) about this guide is that it does not start with a gazillion lines of Elisp code to add to .emacs.d/init.el. I think people should be allowed to experience plain vanilla Emacs and decide for themselves what they want to change. If we just tell them "oh, you definitely want these modes enabled and these settings to these values", I feel they are somehow robbed of the best part of Emacs, namely figuring out what you want your own personal editing experience to be.
This might gets downvoted into oblivion, but my thinking on editor choice is that I either use the lower level pure text editor such as Vim, Sublime Text, Nodepad++ for their speed, or if needed I go all the way with the big ones, like Eclipse/IntelliJ IDEA/Netbeans, for all their bells and whistles.<p>Should I spend time and effort on the middle ones? I admit my feeling comes from standing on the outside lurking. Emacs masters of course know that this 'middle one' feeling is non-sense.<p>But from the perspective of a newbie who sets out to master an editor/IDE, considering the ratio of effort spent on learning/customization/configuration vs. productivity gain (in a certain time span, let's say 20 years), I am trying to decide to take the plunge and learn emacs seriously, in the midst of big IDEs, Atom/Bracket, Neovim (let's hope it delivers).<p>Now please tell me I am so wrong.
Nice guide. I'm trying to get my wife to use Emacs and she has been struggling to make sense of the built in tutorial (as a point of reference, she had practically never used any computing device other than a cell phone before a few years ago). I'll send it to her and see what she thinks.<p>You may ask, "Why the heck are you getting her to use emacs???". I started doing consulting this year and initially for tax reasons decided to have my wife run the company (while I did the programming). It has worked out spectacularly in that my wife loves the job and I can concentrate only on working with the clients. We have to do double entry accounting, though. We're using ledger-cli which has great Emacs org-mode support, so I'm hoping to get her going on that.
When you describe the list of shortcuts for emacs, rather than C-c C-x I would prefer the full Control c or Control x. I programmed in high school in visual basic and c++ but only on windows machines. When I went to college I remember being an absolute beginner and trying to fly through the emacs tutorial and being like, what is capital C? So in other words, do you have a guide or an 'absolute beginners guide'?
Something I think would be useful is a beginner's guide to what you should want your text editor to be capable of. I feel like if you already know what you want to achieve, the main barrier to getting there in Emacs is just getting familiarity with the nomenclature and what packages exist.<p>A good example from this article would be M-q for auto-fill. I was super excited when I discovered that command after spending some time redoing line breaks manually before thinking "I'm sure somebody has solved this problem in Emacs before." I'm sure there are tons of useful text editing hacks that would be really useful that just haven't even occurred to me yet.
Emacs with Evil mode is the best editor ever. For pure text editing capability Vim can't be beat, but it lacks some niceties like ability to run shells, an integrated package installer etc.<p>With Emacs and Evil, you can get the best of both worlds.
I think it might be worth adding C-x C-c to the list of shortcuts, since people would like to know how to get out of the application once launching it. C-g is labeled as quit, which might be confusing to a beginner.
For beginners, this video serious by Jekor is highly recommended : <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxj9UAX4Em-IiOfvF2Qs742LxEK4owSkr" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxj9UAX4Em-IiOfvF2Qs7...</a>
Emacs is actually a lot better with tools like helm:<p><a href="http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html" rel="nofollow">http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html</a><p>Ace-jump is slick too: <a href="http://emacsrocks.com/e10.html" rel="nofollow">http://emacsrocks.com/e10.html</a><p>IDE's like IntelliJ let you type a lot less. Emacs has made some great progress in this direction in the past few years.