EmacsConf 2023 just wrapped up, but you can watch the prerecorded talks here: https://emacsconf.org/2023/

The best way to learn it is to use it. Start with vanilla emacs and a project, and commit to using it. You’ll learn more by needing to figure out how to mark, copy, and paste than just reading about it.

Start with vanilla Emacs. Slowly but surely you’ll grow your config to the point of … throw it away. And start again. Same story a few times and in the end, there you have it.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SiteMap#LearningEmacs

That is, just go to Emacs Wiki. The very first heading after How to use this site is Learning About Emacs.

There you’ll find lots of suggestions from Emacs users, new and veteran (including probably all or most suggestions you’ll find here). Anyone can add their suggestions there (like here, but all in a single place).

I’m pretty new to emacs too, the best tip I can give you is to start from “raw” emacs, make your own config.

Read Docs, look into others config (do not copy paste), watch systemcrafters tutorial video series.

Atm my emacs config is part of my workflow, I’m pretty happy with it.

Work through the tutorial.

Learning emacs is a beautiful journey. I am learning it since 2003, and i think i am in the middle of the the travel. Dont stop if you fall. The road is long.

YouTube has a Lot of great emacs content!

I found this guide helpful.

https://www.masteringemacs.org/

The author posts on this subreddit.

Read the built in documentation.

I’m not really agreeing with much of what is here, and I say that as someone that recently learnt to use (and abuse) Emacs recently.

For starters, vanilla Emacs is just too raw to be useful (especially for coding), but Doom and Spacemacs I found to be too opinionated and basically felt like too much of a deviation from vanilla and like I had bought an off the shelf IDE.

Eventually I found Prelude, and that seemed to be a happy medium of being quite vanilla but still being ready to use for coding.

The major hurdle at the start was keybindings - but I had trained myself a bit by using the Emacs bindings in VS Code first.

Use menus. The key bindings is the Way, but also noh at all logicql in the beginning.

C-x C-c is life saver combo in the beginning.

Welcome!

Try this one

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/

After I got more familiar with Emacs I spent some time to walk through each chapter of the Emacs manual. Even if you think you know how to search and replace within Emacs, after reading the chapter about it you know even more.

And what is most often forgotten: Use the menu bar. You can find most of the basic commands and their shortcuts there.

I agree with r/cljnewbie2019. Unless you are already a champion Vimmer, start with a standard, vanilla Emacs. I was a Vimmer for 23+ years and started using Spacemacs (something like Doom but Doom is much better), but soon got off that and rolled my own evil configuration. I’ve been using Emacs with evil bindings for around 5 years now, and find it suits me well for my current business needs.

But when I have some time, I will switch to vanilla Emacs bindings. Why? Because basically all the documentation for Emacs, plus 99.99% of the packages, are built and documented for vanilla Emacs. Some very nice package will not work at all when using Evil, so you either have to find an Evil version of it, build your own, or do without.

So unless you have good reason to use Doom, you might want to do something else. Doom gives you a “menu structure” by grouping various functions under a prefix key binding. Instead, you could leave the menu bar in place which would give you much of that menu structure. Doom has a good way to configure packages, but it’s the “Doom way or the highway”, and you will find that most packages do not have documentation for Doom installation…so you better know that way of configuring.

OTOH, Doom is highly optimized for speed and for those coming over from the Vim world, it is an excellent choice when making the switch to Emacs. All your ex commands will work as expected, but you’ll use the Doom menu (which is pretty good).

Whatever you do, check out General.el for key bindings. It will make your like a LOT easier when setting up key bindings. Just DDG or google “emacs general.el”. This package will tickle your happy place. It will easily do standard vanilla or Evil key bindings.