| I believe it's important to find a community which would offer quality real-time help. I've seen some, and the really good one was not in English so I can't recommend it, I guess. Freenode emacs chat is said to be filled with offtopic; that's not my cup of tea but you might find it useful. Members of said lovely community thoroughly recommended Mastering Emacs to newcomers as a number one introductory text which I since do as well—mostly because they did. I also recommend built-in tutorial. As for packages, • helm or some other fuzzy completion thing; make sure your M-x, C-h f, C-h v do offer fuzzy completion, it improves discoverability greatly. Recent (27?) Emacsen may have something like this out of the box. • avy: jump to positions on screen • there are several packages that offer insert/command mode including the famous evil-mode but it's a good idea to get used to defaults. “Mastering Emacs” has something on this. I've heard macOS supports default Emacs keys everywhere (not true for other systems) • which-key can display keys and commands available at the moment, quite helpful from the start. You can actually find some of this information with context menu but it is less convenient. The issue with which-key is, you need to configure it to actually see its stuff. A config for it may be found in the link below • https://github.com/a13/emacs.d/blob/master/README.org is a cleanly written init file; if you want a starter config for package x, try searching there for (use-package x ..) expression, copy it to your init file, press C-M-x and it's applied (note: it will often download the package, too). Many popular packages and built-in features are covered. Tweak some parameters, C-M-x, observe the changes immediately. • last but not least, to make use of many existing configurations out there, you will need use-package. So install it early and learn to load it on startup (see the very config above as a reference) |