About This 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.


Xah tutorial focus on actually using emacs in practice, and on efficiency of using emacs, as well as efficiency of learning. Read Xah Emacs Tutorial for just 1 month is more efficient learning than reading 3 emacs books.
- 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. if you have spend few hours on this site, you should buy it. Buy it to support free public work, and you get the whole site's files for fast local reference.