
The bare essential guide to Emacs - hanszeir
http://www.eatingair.com/post/4463441219/the-bare-essential-guide-to-emacs
======
pmr_
Am I the only one that feels that this article isn't HN worthy? Everything
that is said is well documented in the official documentation and it isn't a
guide at all.

The information in it will get a beginner nowhere without reading the tutorial
and if he reads the tutorial the information in this article becomes
meaningless to him.

~~~
kprobst
I was expecting something much better for 40 points and the front page.

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spacemanaki
A much better (alternative to the C-h t tutorial, which is very good) intro to
the bare essentials is the beginner articles from Mastering Emacs:

<http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/category/beginner/>

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hsmyers
Regardless of your stance in the editor wars, the 'first' key or key chord you
need to know about is what it takes to leave the application. How to get in
and how to get out first--- everything else second. The chord BTW is ^x^c I
suppose you could claim that ^z leaves as well, but it is not quite the same
thing. Although many never kill emacs, they just pause and return...

~~~
melling
I would observe that modern emacs has menus so the getting started learning
curve is no more difficult than Notepad.

<http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/>

The command short-cuts are on the menus, so as you get tired of reaching for
the mouse you can begin to use them.

A couple of good reasons to use emacs:

1\. It runs on most platforms. 2\. It's a gateway drug to Lisp. Emacs is
really just a big Lisp interpreter.

~~~
rubergly
I'm curious; do you have experience (or know of someone who does) of learning
Emacs by using it like Notepad and slowly learning the keyboard shortcuts by
looking up things in menus? I'm skeptical that this approach would work; I
think there are a lot of basic (non-obvious) things specific to Emacs that you
need to know to use it well. If you just use it like Notepad and lookup
shortcuts for copying/pasting, then I predict that you would just end up using
it like Notepad.

~~~
waterlesscloud
This has pretty much been my process with it. I started using it sometime last
year. Fumbled completely for a day or so, but started out just using menus and
slowly changing to keyboard commands. That, and googling when I wanted some
behavior that wasn't immediately clear to me.

What I need to do now is read a fairly substantial book/site to tell me about
the things I don't even know I would want to know. The Rumsfeldian unknown
unknowns.

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hvs
In Emacs docs, <Ctrl> is C and (by default, usually) <Alt> is M (for meta).

    
    
      C-x C-c : quit emacs
      C-g C-g C-g : cancel any crazy mess you got yourself into
      C-x C-f : open a file (read a file into the current buffer)
      C-x C-s : save current file (buffer)

~~~
qntm
Also, the "-" in "C-x" means "Hold down Ctrl and press x". It doesn't mean to
press Ctrl and then press x, or to press the "-" key.

You are probably used to that being expressed with a "+", as in "Ctrl+x".

~~~
hvs
Good catch. I guess I've been using Emacs for too long. :)

One other thing that I missed when I first started using emacs was how to
cut/copy/paste:

    
    
      C-space : start selecting text to cut/copy (move cursor to select)
      M-w     : copy
      C-w     : cut (kill)
      C-y     : paste (yank)

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jherdman
Is there something better than Viper mode for Vim folks? It just doesn't feel
complete... I'm trying to give Emacs a shot as I learn Clojure.

~~~
pavelludiq
I came to emacs from Vim, and at first i tried Viper mode, but i gave up and
just went with learning emacs as it is. It payed of in the long term.

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joubert
the title is very accurate

