Practical Emacs Tutorial
This chapter teach emacs in a practical way. From beginner to more advanced use of emacs.
Each page is independent. Pick one you are interested learning.
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 builtin 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.
Buy my tutorial. Show some love.
Xah Talk Show 2022-09-29 the Most Efficient Emacs Workflow, more efficient than vim
Emacs Tutorial
Quick Start
- Where to Download
- Check Version
- Launch Emacs
- Exit/Quit Emacs
- Emacs First Day
- Basic Emacs Keys
- Basic Tips
- Fun with Emacs
- Emacs on Windows
- Emacs Principles, Command and Keys
Font
Split Window
File
Buffer
Copy/Paste
Find Replace
- Search Text
- Highlight Text
- List/Delete Lines
- Search Text in Dir
- Find Replace
- Find Replace in Dir
- Regular Expression
Unicode
Whitespace
Rectangle Edit
Line Wrap
Shell
View Special File
Editing Brackets
Org Mode
HTML
Emacs Efficiency
- Keyboard Macro
- Completion
- Hippie Expand
- Abbrev Mode
- Use Alias for Fast M-x
- Jump to Previous Mark
- Universal Argument (prefix arg)
- Repeat Last Prompted Command
- Effective Windows Management
- Tips on Long Term Emacs Productivity