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by vtanase 4840 days ago
Hello,

as someone who shied away from regular IDEs to use Emacs for programming work, I would recommend that you start setting things up for some very specific need.

As it was already pointed out, Emacs is huge and you will never stop learning it. Therefore, if your main line of work implies writing Java code, I would recommend you look for some tutorials that are particularly aimed at that, and build on those as you need more out of your editor. For example right now I am looking at learning org-mode to be able to do time tracking with it.

If you seriously consider using Emacs all the time I would recommend remapping the Ctrl key to Caps Lock for easier typing.

Since you were asking for some tutorials, these are the two tutorials that I found most useful in defining my Emacs setup:

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs - specific things that are very useful in your configuration

http://devblog.avdi.org/category/emacs-reboot/ - someone in the ruby community, remaking his emacs config from scratch and explaining it as he goes

I am no where near a proficient Emacs user, but maybe I can provide some insight as a fellow learner if you get stuck. I believe my e-mail should be in my profile if you have any problem starting up with Emacs.

Have a nice day, Vlad

2 comments

This absolutely, best way to learn is to have a specific goal in mind. I got started with emacs because I was using an IDE called RStudio (http://www.rstudio.com/) which I really liked, and I wanted something similar for python but couldn't find anything to suit my needs. I set out to recreate the functionality of RStudio in emacs and have (largely) succeeded. It took a lot of mucking around but I really learned my way around the editor.
Well done to have replicated RStudio for pyhton on Emacs. I am interested by that, do you have the ELisp code somewhere? Thanks!
Steve Yegge's effective emacs is definitely worth a read. It helped me get used to emacs without contracting RSI :) FWIW, I'm bilingual - I use Vim to write code and emacs to write in English.