When you have read this book you will understand Emacs

Learn Emacs from the ground up. In the Mastering Emacs ebook you will learn the answers to all the concepts that take weeks, months or even years to truly learn, all in one place.

“Emacs is such a hard editor to learn”

But why is it so hard to learn? As it turns out, it's almost always the same handful of issues that everyone faces.

If you have tried to learn Emacs you will have struggled with the same problems everyone faces, and few tutorials to see you through it.

I have dedicated the first half of the book to explaining the essence of Emacs — and in doing so, how to overcome these issues:

Memorizing Emacs’s keys

You will learn Emacs one key at a time, starting with the arrow keys. To feel productive in Emacs, it’s important you start on an equal footing — without too many new concepts and keys to memorize. Each chapter will introduce more keys and concepts so you can learn at your own pace.

Discovering new modes and features

Emacs is a self-documenting editor, and I will teach you how to use the apropos, info, and describe system to discover new modes and features, or help you find things you forgot!

Customizing Emacs

You don’t have to learn Emacs Lisp to alter a lot of Emacs’s functionality. Most changes you want to make are possible using Emacs’s Customize interface and I will show you how to use it efficiently.

Understanding the terminology

Emacs is so old it predates almost every other editor and all modern user interfaces. I have an entire chapter dedicated to the unique terminology in Emacs; how it is different from other editors, and what that means to you.

When you read my book you will learn how to overcome all these issues and, with practice, master all of them.

Not just for beginners…

When you have read and understood the first half of the book — teaching you the basics of Emacs — the other half of the book covers the practical, hands-on skills that’ll improve your productivity:

Movement Commands

There are dozens of movement commands and I will show you how to use them to get from where you are here you need to go.

Modifying Text

Editing text is one thing Emacs is especially good at. Learn how to transpose and kill text; how to search and replace with regular expressions; sort by lines or patterns; columnate text with the alignment commands; how to filter and count things; and much more.

Selections and Regions

What is a point and what’s a mark? Why is selecting text in Emacs so different? Learn how to use selections effectively.

Window Management

Emacs is a tiling window manager and understanding Emacs’s windowing system is a key part of using Emacs.

Macros

Emacs ships with a very sophisticated macro facility that lets you automate text editing tasks. I’ll show you how you how to automate text editing with macros to save time.

Workflow

Several in-depth workflow tutorials where I solve a particular problem with Emacs using a variety of built-in tools and facilities to show you how to use and combine the skills you have learned. I explain how to explore and learn about an hitherto unknown feature in Emacs; how to use Dired to manipulate files and directories; how to use TRAMP to seamlessly edit files remotely; and how to call out to external shells.