[kabdib]

I would just get _some_ version of Emacs and spend an hour with it. The core set of commands is what you want to learn. You don't care about any of the eye candy they've added in the last 20 years. Seriously. Save the "superior LISP session auto yanking" nonsense until you're a power user.

Emacs (and most of the Emacs clones) come with a tutorial. It's pretty decent.

After a while you may find yourself feeling bad that you've not done any customization. "Argh," you say, "This is supposed to be a customizable editor. I should start customizing it so that I can realize the awesome power of this fully operational editor!" No worries. I'm guessing that most Emacs users really don't change much. For C hacking or writing I usually just tweak some settings, add a few macros and I'm good to go. Most of my customizations are turning /off/ things that other folks thought were good features. No names, now. :)

tl;dr; Don't worry about the new shiny. There's plenty to learn before you get there.

[emacs user since 1979]

[Derbasti]

Come on now, the builtin Emacs tutorial is atrocious. It tries to teach you the most basic stuff, like what the CTRL key looks like or how to hit arrow keys. Do you really think anyone who does not know the CTRL key would pick up Emacs?

Honestly, at least one of my attempts to get into Emacs died because of disgust of tutorial. It could teach the very same content without being that condescending and outdated. I loathe it.

Funny enough, the gnu.org guided tour through Emacs is really good! Just rewrite the tutorial in a slightly more modern style. I am sure this would increase Emacs adoption quite significantly.

[jockc]

Well that's interesting; I started using emacs around 1986 or so, and the first thing I did was go thru the tutorial; I don't remember it being overly basic at all.

[Derbasti]

Alright. It took me a few minutes to actually find a suitable version of Emacs for Windows. Then it took me another minute or so to find the English tutorial.

As I quickly scan through the tutorial:

The tutorial assumes I am using a terminal. To be fair, I might. However, it specifically assumes that I am using a terminal from the 1980s. However, I actually have working arrow keys, a mouse and an ALT key. Not META or EDIT. This is what PCs, Linuxes and Macs have converged on. ALT keys, arrow keys and mouses.

Quote: "there should be a tall rectangular area called a scroll bar on one side of the Emacs window...", "Try pressing the middle button at the top of the highlighted area within the scroll bar. This should scroll the text to a position determined by how high or low you click". And so on. First off, it is left mouse, not middle mouse. Then, some of the described behaviors are plain wrong on a modern Windows system (or Mac or Linux for the matter). But really, does Emacs have to explain what a scrollbar is? Honestly?

Then there is stuff like "when saving is finished...". Saving files does not take time any more. Especially not for novices, who are less likely to open several megs of log files.

Quote: "If you are using a graphical display that supports multiple applications in parallel...". What does Emacs think? That I am using Emacs on an iPhone, probably. It has been a really long time since I have seen a "graphical system" that did not support multiple applications in parallel.

Oh well. This should give you an idea. Apart from that the tutorial is not that bad. Just pretty boring. For what it's worth, I remember having quite a bit of fun doing the Vim tutorial, while the Emacs tutorial left me bored and confused. But maybe that has other reasons than the objective quality of the tutorials.