Read the built in documentation.

YouTube has a Lot of great emacs content!

https://www.masteringemacs.org/

The author posts on this subreddit.

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.

Uncle Dave’s Emacs Playlist Is All You Need:

- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX2044Ew-UVVv31a0-Qn3dA6Sd_-NyA1n

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.

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.

Use menus. The key bindings is the Way, but also noh at all logicql in the beginning.

C-x C-c is life saver combo in the beginning.

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.

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 :)

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap#LearningEmacs

That is, just go to Emacs Wiki. The very first heading after How to use this site is Learning About Emacs.

There you’ll find lots of suggestions from Emacs users, new and veteran (including probably all or most suggestions you’ll find here). Anyone can add their suggestions there (like here, but all in a single place).

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.

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

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