Emacs is a Lisp machine. Lisp is a programming language from the 1950s but it’s good. It looks different from C or JavaScript or shell scripts but just like them, you can make functions, and functions can be marked as interactive so they can be called as commands. Don’t worry, it comes with a huge amount of ready-made commands.
Commands can be bound to keyboard shortcuts, and many are, by default.
Emacs nerds write about keyboard shortcuts in an unusual way. Where a
Windows user would write Ctrl+G, an Emacs nerd would express that as
C-g. C is control, S is shift (does not work very well over
Blink/Mosh), M is meta or alt or escape.
Keyboard bindings can be long chains, like the ESC ESC ESC example
here. (Important to remember when you’re using describe-key, which
can get confusing on such a “prefix key”.)
apropos (search for Lisp stuff including commands and options. You can use regex)describe-function (describes a function, including interactive ones. Great when you’re writing your own Emacs Lisp functions, too! And, you can jump right into the source code!)describe-key (what would happen if you press a particular key? Find out here!)describe-variable (good for settings and such)describe-mode (see Modes, below)info (for reading docs, but probably just easier to look online)You can put stuff in init.el and it’ll get run when you start Emacs (and when you eval it).
A great place to make your own commands and to set options.
For example, you can put
(setq backup-by-copying t)
This literally sets a variable named backup-by-copying to t, in Lisp code, to set an option.
There’s also a settings GUI and it adds stuff to this file for you, it’s called customize.
Modes are like apps in Emacs. Each buffer can have one major mode and
any number of minor modes. I am typing this post in markdown-mode
with a bunch of minor modes on.
There are modes for Vim nerds (evil-mode, see Packages, below) and
for Windows nerds (cua-mode) and many others, so you can use the
keyboard bindings you’re used to.
There are competing package managers in Emacs because of course there is.
I dislike the default one in favor of one called straight.el, because of two reasons:
Another alternative package managing system, quelpa, share that second quality but straight.el is the best because of the first.
Other popular package systems include Doom (which is based on straight.el, and, Doom Emacs is like it’s own ready-made distro made by a Vim user. I haven’t tried it personally because get off my lawn I’m old but it looks good) and Spacemacs, another Vim-centric system that I don’t understand (something something layers?).
Emacs undo system works very differently than the modern undo/redo setup, but there’s a package that makes it work normal. I don’t use it because I got used to the weird Emacs way. Which I can’t explain or barely even consciously understand. Some deep part of my psyche learned it by trial and brutal error.
One thing I wish I had learned earlier is that the keyboard bindings
F5 through F8, in addition to commands that start with C-c and a
letter, are reserved for your own custom stuff and won’t get clobbered
by well-behaved modes. C-c followed by Control combos aren’t reserved
for you, but loose letter combos are, like C-c a and C-c A (which
can be different).
Of course you can also override other keyboard bindings too, I do that all the time, but it’s nice to know that there are some that are reserved for your own stuff that packages aren’t really supposed to clobber.
What makes Emacs so much better than any other OS is how you can mix
and match stuff from different “apps” on the function level. I’ve set
it up so I can use the block quote formatter from markdown-mode when
I’m writing emails in notmuch-message-mode.
Here’s some of the first things I’d fix.