Welcome, brave soul!
You’ve probably heard the jokes. “Emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor.” Or my personal favorite: “vi has two modes—beep repeatedly and break everything. Emacs has one mode: do everything.”
But here’s the thing: those jokes exist because Emacs really can do everything. And that’s not a bug—it’s the entire point.
I wrote this book because every Emacs tutorial I’ve ever read falls into one of two camps:
This book aims for the sweet spot. We’ll start with the basics—how to edit text without crying—and gradually work our way up to the point where you’re managing your entire digital life from within Emacs. By the end, you’ll understand why some of us can’t imagine working any other way.
If you’re coming from Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ, or any modern IDE, this book is especially for you. I know Emacs looks alien. I know the keybindings seem designed by someone who hates your fingers. I know the terminology sounds like it was lifted from a 1970s mainframe manual (because it was).
But I also know that once it clicks, you’ll have a tool that can grow with you for the next 40 years. Emacs users from the 1980s are still using Emacs today—with the same configuration files they’ve been nurturing for decades. Try that with your JavaScript framework!
This journey will take us through:
Learning Emacs is like learning a musical instrument. The first week is painful. The first month is frustrating. But somewhere around month two, you’ll do something—maybe it’s recording a macro, maybe it’s your first Org-mode table calculation, maybe it’s realizing you can read your email while your code compiles—and you’ll think, “Oh. OH. This is why people love this thing.”
And then you’ll spend the next decade discovering new things it can do.
Each chapter builds on the previous one, but they’re also designed to be relatively standalone. If you’re already comfortable with basic editing and want to jump straight to Org-mode, go for it! Though I’d recommend at least skimming the philosophy chapter—understanding why Emacs works the way it does makes everything else easier.
Also, throughout this book, you’ll see sections marked:
Fire up Emacs. If you don’t have it installed yet, we’ll cover that in Chapter 1. If you do, try this:
C-h t (that’s Ctrl+h, then t)Yes, Emacs has been teaching people how to use Emacs since before the internet existed. It’s recursive, it’s meta, and it’s very Emacs.
Ready? Let’s turn you into an Emacs user. And maybe, just maybe, an Emacs enthusiast.
After all, once you start using Emacs for everything, you’ll wonder why anyone would want multiple programs when one will do.
“Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.” —Neal Stephenson