I am a newbie to emacs and Linux in general (started my linux journey 2 months ago) and want to learn emacs. Does anyone have good ressources to learn emacs as a beginner? Also should I use a distro like doom Emacs or should I do it from scratch

  • diegostamigni@alien.topB
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    11 months ago

    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.

  • Nurahk@alien.topB
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    11 months ago

    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.

  • need_a_nick@alien.topB
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    11 months ago

    I’m not really agreeing with much of what is here, and I say that as someone that recently learnt to use (and abuse) Emacs recently.

    For starters, vanilla Emacs is just too raw to be useful (especially for coding), but Doom and Spacemacs I found to be too opinionated and basically felt like too much of a deviation from vanilla and like I had bought an off the shelf IDE.

    Eventually I found Prelude, and that seemed to be a happy medium of being quite vanilla but still being ready to use for coding.

    The major hurdle at the start was keybindings - but I had trained myself a bit by using the Emacs bindings in VS Code first.

  • ejingles@alien.topB
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    11 months ago

    I’m pretty new to emacs too, the best tip I can give you is to start from “raw” emacs, make your own config.

    Read Docs, look into others config (do not copy paste), watch systemcrafters tutorial video series.

    Atm my emacs config is part of my workflow, I’m pretty happy with it.

  • fediverser@alien.top
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    11 months ago

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  • Wumpitz@alien.topB
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    11 months ago

    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.

  • zobi8225@alien.topB
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    11 months ago

    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.