Practical Emacs Tutorial

About This Tutorial

This tutorial is designed for writers, scientists, engineers, to get started on emacs quickly. Each page teaches you something practical you can use right away. No emacs jargons. No need programing experience.

If you were to spend 3 months reading 3 emacs books, it is more efficient to just read Xah Emacs Tutorial for just 1 month. Xah tutorial focus on actually using emacs in practice, and on efficiency of using emacs, as well as efficiency of learning.

• This tutorial skips the emacs parts that are rarely used. Every single one thousand emacs C-x commands are looked, the practical ones are presented to you.
• The writing style is concrete, and example based. No story telling, no joke, just what you need to know to use emacs in the most efficient way.
• This tutorial does not force emacs jargons and emacs hacker methods. If you are new to emacs, you will understand it. If you are old time hacker, you will improve your efficiency of using emacs.
• This tutorial covers emacs lisp, more extensive than any existing emacs book or emacs lisp book (except the elisp manual). A little elisp makes you a far better emacs user and understanding emacs. [see Practical Emacs Lisp]
• There are more examples and elisp code in Xah Emacs Tutorial than all existing emacs books or web sites combined. You do not need to read it all, but any time spent reading this tutorial, you'll learn more useful things than same amount of time spent elsewhere.

Xah Lee live in emacs since 1999. And has been obsessively writing emacs tutorial since 2006.

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Xah Talk Show 2022-09-29 the Most Efficient Emacs Workflow, more efficient than vim