About two years ago I set out to learn Vim for the first time. It was pretty painful at first. But with a lot of work I’ve over the past two year I’ve finally worked Vim into my muscle memory. So what better time to put all that work aside and learn the other one true editor, Emacs?
One of the things I did when learning Vim was to put Vim EVERYWHERE. If there was an option to bind Vi/Vim keystrokes to an app I set it. I’m a big believer in immersion learning. I am too easily distracted and wander back to the “easy path” if given the chance. So I can’t leave any option untouched. Fortunately on OS X the default keybindings already use Emacs keystrokes. Go ahead, try editing a text-field on your Mac and hit C-a then C-e. Where is your cursor? Yeah. That’s emacs.
There are some nice resources available though aside from the baked in help that I’m using to help ease the transition.
Do the Emacs Tutorial. It’s very useful and should be the first starting point for everyone.
The cheat rubygem hooks into http://cheatsheets.org and provides a nice little command line utility to browse cheatsheets directly from the command line.
gem install cheat
cheat sheets | grep emacs # finds all emacs sheets
cheat emacs
This is a brand new resource that has a lot of potential. There’s only one screencast up right now but it’s useful for beginners.
- Emacs navigation cheatsheet
A very handy visual reference to Emacs commands by Martin Grund that was inspired by a similar visual reference for Vim by Tim Naleid.
I’ve set this as my wallpaper and it’s a handy visual reference on the standard Emacs motion keys. I also set a hotspot corner on OS X so if I need a quick reminder on how to move by paragraph or delete a character it’s a flick of my mouse away.
It’s slightly dated as it was released for Emacs 22 but the screencast is very high quality and a great introduction to the editor and how powerful it can be.
Another paid video be a great chance to see Emacs wielded by a real power user. Gary also compares Emacs to Vim (he seems to favor Vim) but he outlines some of the pros and cons of using each editor.
This is the real gem in my opinion. I’d started this blog post describing some of the pain I was working through to get Emacs up and running. But Emacs Prelude saved me a great deal of frustration by providing a very functional set of defaults that are good for web, Ruby and Clojure development (probably more but those are what I was most excited to see).
Emacs Prelude requires Emacs 24 but if you’re on OS X with Homebrew that’s the current version anyway. The Prelude author provides instructions on how to install Emacs 24 on Linux as well.
Word of warning, Emacs Prelude is opinionated. You are going to be expected to use the directional commands as Emacs Prelude disables the arrow keys by default. IMO that’s a great way to learn. No backsliding!
There a few Emacs related accounts that I’ve gathered up for my own eduction under a Twitter list. Lot’s of interesting tidbits and a great way to find new resources. For example, I learned about the next resource by clicking around through some tweets in this list.
This seems to be a little bit abandoned but there seemed to be a lot of potential there. Some nice articles targeted towards new Emacs users.
TOTAL INSANITY. This is really advanced stuff but pretty fascinating none-the-less.
If you’re not already familiar with VimGolf, it’s a competition to complete a series of tasks in Vim using the fewest keystrokes possible. Some people go through a great deal of advanced Vimnastics to get an editor already known for it’s terseness to complete these tasks. Watch Tim Visher dominate Emacs (an editor not known for it’s terseness) and take on the VimGolf challenge.
Recommendations?
Do you have a favorite resource? Please post it in the comments. I’m always looking for new ways to learn and interesting articles to read. Right now I’m a beginner so I’d like resources targeted towards Emacs newbs. Thanks.
Updates
Just learned about this through my
Emacs Twitter List. I’m yet to
read through it yet but it looks like it’s focused more on learning
how to customize and program Emacs.
A series of screencasts on how to use Emacs. Haven’t watched an
episode yet but there’s 10 of ‘em and and a quick peek they look to be
pretty high quality and worth a watch.
