[tlug] Learning Emacs (was: how to keep track of one's work... another'BestPractices' question)

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

On 11/9/05, Micheal E Cooper <mcooper@example.com> wrote:

> Thank you so much. I will definitely look into this, even if it means
> learning Emacs (which I must admit that I am hesitant to do).

Learning Emacs is actually not that hard, in that you can learn in a
progressive fashion. When you first start out, treat Emacs just like
an extremely simply plaintext editor, like notepad.exe on That Other
OS: use the arrow keys to move about, and just type what you want.
Hell, the Home and End keys work like you would expect in recent
versions of Emacs. Same with Ctrl + Home and Ctrl + End (though in
Emacs-speak, those key chords would be called C-Home and C-End,
respectively). C-RightArrow and C-LeftArrow also work as in WSYWYG
editors, moving a word at a time.

Start there, and little by little, learn how to unleash Emacs's more
powerful features, like regexp search-and-replace, etc. Since you know
vi (right? or am I mis-remembering), you might find the following
cheat sheet helpful in the beginning:

http://www.jmglov.net/unix/vi-for-emacs-users.html

I wrote it as an Emacser learning vi, but it should work in reverse, as well.

Cheers,
Josh