Working on the Emacs newbie experience

| emacs, community

The Emacs Carnival April 2026 theme of newbies/starter kits nudged me to think about how new users can learn what they need in order to get started. In particular, I wanted to think about these questions that newbies might have:

  • Is it worth it?
  • How do I start?
  • Should I use a starter kit? How?
  • I'm stuck, how can I get help?
  • This is overwhelming. How do I make it more manageable?

I worked on some pages in the EmacsWiki:

People often recommend Emacs News to people who want to learn more about what's going on in the Emacs community, so I added some notes to that one as well.

Just gotta find some newbies to test these ideas with… Email me! =)

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Emacs beginner resources

: Updated my page from 2014 with more recent resources.

Welcome to Emacs! Thank you for considering this strange and wonderful text editor. Here are some resources that can help you on your journey.

Many people use Emacs just for Org Mode. Here are some resources for getting started:

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2026-04-27 Emacs news

| emacs, emacs-news

There was a big discussion on lobste.rs about people's favourite Emacs packages and that sparked similar conversations on Reddit and HN. Discussions like that are a great source of inspiration. I added a couple of small improvements to my config based on this week's Emacs news, like diff-hl.

Also, lots of people expressed their appreciation for Chris Wellons, who is moving on to other editors for now. Me, I've enjoyed using simple-httpd, impatient, and skewer, and I'm glad Chris made and shared them. Many of his packages already have new maintainers, and the rest are up for adoption. Perhaps we'll see him around again someday!

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, r/orgmode, r/spacemacs, Mastodon #emacs, Bluesky #emacs, Hacker News, lobste.rs, programming.dev, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, planet.emacslife.com, YouTube, the Emacs NEWS file, Emacs Calendar, and emacs-devel. Thanks to Andrés Ramírez for emacs-devel links. Do you have an Emacs-related link or announcement? Please e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Thank you!

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La semaine du 13 au 19 avril

| french

lundi 13

Ma fille a séché les cours toute la journée. Elle a dit qu'elle était fatiguée. Elle est restée à la maison au lieu d'aller à son cours de gymnastique.

J'ai configuré obs-websocket pour lancer et arrêter la diffusion en direct depuis Emacs.

Il faisait très beau, donc je me suis assise dehors et j'ai lu la configuration d'Emacs de tecosaur. Non seulement sa configuration était très détaillée, mais elle était aussi magnifiquement mise en page.

J'ai préparé mon bulletin d'information sur Emacs pendant que je diffusais en direct.

Le glacier était toujours fermé, donc nous avons acheté de la crème glacée au supermarché à la place.

À l'heure du coucher, ma fille a dit qu'elle aurait aimé rester une enfant. Elle a dit qu'elle aimait bien KidSpark, qui est réservé aux enfants jusqu'à 10 ans.

mardi 14

Ma fille a suivi son cours. Après l'école, nous avons fait du vélo au parc pour jouer avec ses amies, qui en faisaient aussi.

J'ai continué à améliorer obs-websocket pour gérer mon direct depuis Emacs. J'ai aussi réécrit mon correctif pour l'opération « sentence-at-point » sur Org Mode.

J'étais fatiguée et j'avais un peu mal à la tête.

mercredi 15

Ma fille s'est réveillée tard, mais elle a participé à son cours toute seule.

J'ai mis à jour mon OBS pour ajouter socialstream.ninja via une source navigateur. Maintenant, je peux afficher les commentaires et je peux envoyer un message depuis Emacs sur YouTube.

J'ai travaillé un peu comme consultante. Le design du profil avait besoin d'une petite correction.

Ma fille et moi avons joué à Stardew Valley.

Mon mari avait une course près du Musée des beaux-arts de l'Ontario. Ma fille était heureuse de sécher les cours l'après-midi parce que l'école avait une remplaçante. J'ai emmené ma fille là-bas et nous avons passé du temps à essayer les activités au musée et à dessiner sur nos tablettes.

Après le dîner, nous nous sommes entraînées à peindre des yeux avec des aquarelles.

jeudi 16

J'avais rendez-vous avec Protesilaos pour l'informer de mes progrès depuis notre conversation précédente et lui poser mes nouvelles questions. J'ai fait fonctionner mon code pour lancer ma vidéo à partir d'un horodatage et j'ai écrit une fonction pour calculer la conversion entre l'heure réelle et le temps écoulé.

Ma fille et moi avons joué à la Play-Doh, au sungka (un jeu traditionnel philippin), et aux charades.

vendredi 17

J'ai révisé les sous-titres de ma conversation avec Prot d'hier. J'ai ajouté deux fonctions pour gérer l'étiquette d'interlocuteur quand on divise ou fusionne des sous-titres. J'ai aussi programmé trois conversations sur Emacs et j'ai publié les événements sur YouTube et sur mon site grâce à d'autres fonctions. J'ai aussi modifié ma bibliothèque pour publier mon site afin qu'elle n'inclue pas les fichiers privés.

J'ai travaillé sur nos impôts.

Ma fille s'est réveillée toute seule ce matin, à temps pour le petit-déjeuner, notre routine matinale, et son interrogation de mathématiques à l'école. Mais elle a séché les cours l'après-midi et elle s'est assise tout l'après-midi contre sa porte. Au lieu de se détendre, elle s'est davantage braquée contre moi. Je ne sais pas quoi faire dans cette situation.

samedi 18

Pour le petit-déjeuner, j'ai préparé des crêpes avec le reste de la crème fouettée. Il reste juste un peu de la créme, donc je n'ai pas pu fouetter dans le mélanger. J'ai fouetté à la main. J'ai aussi utilisé la crème fouettée congelée que j'avais faite il y a plusieurs mois. Je les ai mangé avec des pêches et de la mangue. C'était parfait.

Lire la configuration lettrée d'Emacs de tecosaur me rend jaloux de sa mise en page, donc j'ai passé du temps en ameliorant l'export de ma configuration. C'est très long. Le PDF est 736 pages. Seule la table de matières est 15 pages. Je veux ajouter plus de commentaires et implementer plus d'exports LaTeX pour mes types de liens.

Ma fille était grincheuse contre moi du matin, mais l'après-midi, elle a réapparu et elle a voulu passer du temps avec moi.

Nous avons joué à Minecraft pour essayer les nouveaux cubes de soufre. Nous avons généré un Warden et lui avons donné un cube qui nous donnaient un bloc de champignon. Le Warden s'amusait avec le cube.

Nous avons joué avec Play-Doh. Je l'ai étalé très finement et nous l'avons coupé à beaucoup de pièces. Elle les a tressé. Elle a voulu essayer une tresse couronne, donc j'ai tressé ses cheveux.

Pour le dîner, nous avons préparé des sushis.

Nous avons joué encore à Stardew Valley Expanded. Nous avons bien progressé dans les paquets du centre communautaire, même si j'ai oublié d'obtenir l'engrais de centre communautaire après la Fête des Œufs pour accélerer les fraises. Tant pis.

Ma fille a pratiqué son vocabulaire français en racontant l'histoire de la famille d'Eevee.

dimanche 19

Ma fille s'est réveillée à 8h00 aujourd'hui. Elle trouve que c'est plus facile de se réveiller quand il n'y a pas école. Il est bon que je n'avait pas commencé une diffusion en direct.

Ma fille et moi sommes allées aux Stockyards à vélo pour acheter des tissus pour coudre un chapeau d'été. Elle avait fait du lèche-vitrine mais elle n'en avait pas trouvé un qui lui convenait, donc nous devons le faire nous-même. Elle a choisi du tissu jaune Pokémon. Elle a aussi voulu de la laine pour faire du crochet une couverture.

Nous avons mangé du Panda Express pour le déjeuner. Le repas enfant m'a suffi.

Je l'ai déposée à la maison et j'ai apporté des donations au Goodwill en faisant le grand ménage. J'ai aussi fait les courses. Une fois que je suis rentrée, ma fille m'a montré fièrement qu'elle a fait les lits comme un hôtel.

Nous avons joué à Stardew Valley Expanded après le dîner. L'été a commencé. Je pense que je dois planter plus de doubeurre pour le paquet récoltes de qualité qui demande 5 récoltes de qualité or.

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April 30 Yay Emacs: Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs - Newbies/Starter Kits

| emacs, community, yay-emacs

Watch on YouTube

I will livestream it and update this post with notes.

(America/Toronto, UTC-4) = Thu Apr 30 1030H EDT / 0930H CDT / 0830H MDT / 0730H PDT / 1430H UTC / 1630H CEST / 1730H EEST / 2000H IST / 2230H +08 / 2330H JST

The Emacs Carnival theme for April 2026 is newbies/starter kits. I'd like to chat with Prot about not only helping people get into Emacs but also supporting lifelong learning.

Prot had some notes on how he started with Emacs in 2019 in All about switching to Emacs (video blog) | Protesilaos. These notes were just a few months after he started, so his experience was pretty fresh.

In Computing in freedom with GNU Emacs | Protesilaos (2026), he said:

Remember that I started using Emacs without a background in programming. … I learnt the basics within a few days. I started writing my own Emacs Lisp within weeks. And within a year I had my modus-themes moved into core Emacs.

Prot has several projects that might be of interest to many newcomers to Emacs:

  • modus-themes, which are part of Emacs core and are therefore just a M-x load-theme away
  • Emacs Lisp Elements, a book that helps people learn Emacs Lisp
    • Where does this fit into people's learning journeys? How can they come across it and use it?
  • perhaps Denote
    • What would it take for people to learn enough to be able to use this?

He also offers Emacs coaching. I wonder if any newbies have taken advantage of that. There are a few other coaches listed on the EmacsWiki. (Ooh, Emacs buddy, that was neat.)

Other possible topics: Philip suggested the following general themes for the Emacs Carnival:

  • What are your memories of starting with Emacs?
  • What experiences do you have with teaching Emacs to new users?
  • Do you think if starter kits are more of a hindrance in the long term or necessary for many users to even try Emacs?
  • What defaults do you think should be changed for everyone (new and old users)?
  • What defaults do you think should be changed for new users (see NewcomersTheme)?
  • What is the sweet-spot between starter-kit minimalism and maximalism?
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YE20: Emacs Carnival: Newbies/starter kits

| yay-emacs, emacs, community

This was a rough braindump on what I might want to write or do for the Emacs Carnival theme this month.

Watch on YouTube

Outline

2026-04-22-01 Thinking about Emacs Carnival April 2026 - newbies and starter kits.jpeg
2026-04-22-01 Thinking about Emacs Carnival April 2026 - newbies and starter kits.jpeg

  • Emacs Carnival April 2026: newbies/starter kits
  • Start with why
    • Curious
      • Cool demo
      • Reputation
      • Someone else (ex: professor)
    • Learning at leisure vs wanting to be productive ASAP
      • Coding professionally; used to VS Code or Vim
    • Journey:
      • Outsiders
      • Newbie
      • Basic working environment
      • Intermediate
        • Packages
        • Configuration
      • Advanced
        • Writing custom code
    • TODO: possibly a post about where people come from and typical resources, next steps
  • Challenges
    • Balance of time
      • Getting a basic environment working
        • Things like git performance on Windows, consoles / window managers taking over keybindings
        • Starter kit trade-off
          • Plus: Get stuff working quickly
          • Minus: Limits your help to the kit's community, can be challenging to customize further
    • Isolation
      • Don't know someone else who can watch them, lean over, fix stuff, suggest improvements, etc.
    • Overwhelm
      • Too much to fit into your brain
      • Don't know how to break things down into smaller steps (which steps, etc.)
    • Unknowns
      • Not knowing the words to look for
      • Not knowing what is close by, what is possible
  • What can help?
  • Stuff I work on / can tinker with
  • Continuous learning
    • Connecting with the community
    • Blogging
    • Managing overwhelm, etc.

Transcript

Transcript

00:00:04 Introduction
Alright, let's see. Hello stream, this is Yay Emacs 20, and today I want to brainstorm some thoughts for an Emacs Carnival post on newbies and starter kits. Okay, alright, and the audio works. Alright, so Yay Emacs 20, Emacs Carnival, newbies and starter kits. That is this page. Yes. So, every month or so, pretty much every month so far, people have been getting together to write about a shared topic. And this month's topic is newbies and starter kits. So, originally proposed by Cena, but Philip added some topics to start with. Things like, what are your memories of starting with Emacs? What experiences do you have with teaching Emacs to new users? Do you think starter kits are more of a hindrance in the long term or necessary for many users to even try Emacs? What defaults do you think should be changed for everyone? What defaults do you think should be changed for new users? And what is the sweet spot between starter kit minimalism and maximalism? So, let me get myself organized here. I want to start off by maybe making a mind map and seeing how that goes. Let's try sharing. I'll do some screen mirroring from my iPad. See if it works. It'll be fun. Okay, there's the pen. Okay, let me think. Newbies... Newbies and starter kits. I like starting with a mind map because I jump all over the place anyway. Starting with something non-linear helps a bit. Okay,

00:02:17 Overall structure
starting with why. People come to Emacs for many different reasons. Some people come because they're curious about something. They've seen a cool demo. They have someone they look up to and they say, how did they do that? When it shows there's a new feature, right? Interesting thing. So that's definitely something that gets people into Emacs. I also want to think about the Emacs news. Meetups, EmacsConf. Maybe do a reflection on how I can help more effectively. And then there's always this thing that I have about mapping and coaching. This is kind of the what's close by. How do I get to where I want? And lifelong learning, because it's not just about newbies... Keeping a beginner mind in Emacs is very handy. And so it's helpful to be able to keep thinking about, how do I want to learn? How can I keep learning? Okay, so at this point I'm really just thinking about topics and seeing where I want to go with this. do have chat open somewhere, so if you happen to drop by and have any thoughts, I think I can do that. Aside from that, you know, you can just also just keep me company, um, or, and, uh, something. Where is this, where is this chat window that I'm, yes, okay, there it is. All right, okay. So this is just me thinking out loud about newbies and starter kits because afterwards I can grab the transcript and start pulling things out into blog posts.

00:04:57 Starting with where people are
So starting from where people are. Sometimes people are curious, either just because of Emacs' reputation or because they've seen a cool demo somewhere and they want to be able to do stuff like that. Uh, sometimes people have kind of, you know, it's, it's totally open. They can, they can learn at leisure, uh, or sometimes there's some pressure to become productive right away. Let's say, for example, if they're coding as their main job, they know that switching to Emacs will help them learn it a lot faster, but at the same time, they still have to be able to keep up with their work. Which means figuring out things like compilation errors and all that stuff faster, which can be a bit of a struggle when you're new and you're trying to set up your environment for your coding system.

00:05:59 The built-in tutorial (C-h t or M-x help-with-tutorial)
@j7gy8b has a question. Do people still try the built-in tutorial? I think so. I see the built-in tutorial of C-h t highly recommended every time people come across, every time people post those threads on... I'm a beginner, how do I get started? Many people recommend using the beginner tutorial because it will teach basic navigation and concepts in a fairly interactive, easy to grasp manner.

00:06:30 Overwhelm
Oh, and somewhere in here, also in the beginner thing, there's probably something about dealing with overwhelm, because Emacs can be very overwhelming. And this is true even for experienced users. I am constantly running like this. I want to learn a long list of things, but there's only so much I can fit into my brain and have it remember things. Very little, actually. So, dealing with overwhelm is a big problem for new users.

00:06:59 Getting a basic working environment
Oh, and then there's something in here about... you're starting off with, like... a total newbie, you need to get over this hump of getting a basic working environment. And if you're a programmer, actually, that bar's a bit higher because you're used to IDEs and you might be coming from VS Code and Vim and have these expectations of what your editor should already be able to do out of the box or with just a little bit of configuration. So you need to be able to at least do some of your work in it without being very, very annoyed. And then you get to the point eventually where it becomes more fun. So this is like a big hurdle there. And then, I'd say intermediate users are people who are able to find and configure and use packages. @j7gy8b says, by the way, he's Jeff from Emacs San Francisco and doesn't know how to change his display name. I will try to remember that you are Jeff. Something about YouTube and Google, I don't really know either.

00:08:33 Sometimes keybindings don't work
@lispwizard says, one problem is platforms which usurp keystrokes which Emacs expects. I just wrestled with this on a Raspberry Pi, especially since there are so many keybindings. So for example, the GUI versus terminal thing. There are some keybindings that don't work if you don't have a GUI Emacs. And of course, if you have a GUI Emacs, and you're in a window manager, and the window manager also has a lot of global shortcuts that that override the ones that Emacs has. So when newbies come across, oh yeah, just use, meta shift left in order to do this thing in Org Mode, which is super cool. And they're like, it doesn't work for me. But they don't have the experience to know, oh, it's because it's a terminal, or oh, it's because, and so forth. So that's definitely all these little things that trip people up. Oh, and I was thinking about... Advanced would be like writing their own custom code. So, if you're trying... this thing here is a big hump, trying to get people through this journey.

00:09:52 Isolation
And, oh, there's also this... some people are isolated. Most people are isolated, I think. They don't know anyone who also uses Emacs. Maybe they're coming across Emacs because they found it in a book or they found it in a cool video, but they don't have someone who can physically sit with them and take control of their computer and set things up the way they want, solve their little Emacs Lisp issues or help them even just figure out the words to find things when they don't even know what they want to ask for. So isolation here. If you happen to be learning Emacs with the help of a mentor, or because your professor really likes Emacs and makes all of their students use it, at least for the course, for the term that they're taking it, then yeah, that's extra lucky because you have someone you can ask for help. But I think a lot of people are picking up Emacs without being able to sit next to someone or look over someone's shoulder in order to discover ways of doing things, which is why meetups helps. Meetups help a lot. Okay, so let's draw a connection between that and meetups. Isolation. Oh, there's also like, having like background expectations and knowledge. And here, these days, it's usually either VS Code or Vim. What other things? Ooh.

00:11:27 Programming vs non-programming backgrounds
Programming versus non-programming. There are a lot of people who actually get into this from a non-programming background. So, programming. Org is a big thing that's drawing in people who are writers and note-takers. This is a whole, like, other... Okay. So there are a lot of things that get in people's way when it comes to thinking about like when it comes to learning Emacs.

00:12:11 Students
Okay, Jeff says in the meetup we do see that young people who are inspired by a professor to try and a lot of Emacs transmission happens this way where you have your stalwart Emacs users who are faculty and who just basically say, all right, this year, you're going to learn... Could be Scheme, could be data science or whatever else. And we're going to do it in Emacs because all of their lecture notes are in Emacs, so it's much easier for them to say here's my literate programming example of what I'm talking about. I'm just going to evaluate it during the lecture itself. So you can see that. And you all should learn Emacs. Usually they'll hedge it and say, you can use other editors if you really, really want to. But there's definitely: here's how to get started. Here's the tutorial made for this course specifically. Here are all the modules that you need. And a lot of people go from there and, and just, it clicks into their brain and they have someone to talk to: both a professor and fellow students who are learning all of this arcane stuff for the first time. So that is an excellent situation to be learning Emacs in. But it's not everyone's experience, so it'll be interesting to see how to support that case as well as other cases. I should write that down somewhere. School. Okay. So, challenges, obstacles.

00:13:56 Basic working environment
This basic working environment thing, I think, is one of the struggles because, like, for example, if people want to get things working with the current best practices for coding JavaScript or coding Python, sometimes getting LSP working just the right way is a finicky process. And then, of course, there's platform differences, like Magit being very slow on Windows. Which can't actually get around because Windows just really sucks when it comes to lots of small file operations. And so people end up recommending using WSL, Windows Subsystem for Linux, instead, which, again, is something that a newbie might not consider or come across or feel comfortable setting up. And then, of course, just install Linux, which is not always an option for people. Let me think. Okay, where are we now? There's so much to write about. What else do I take into account? What else can I add to the conversation? Okay, the stuff that I specifically know.

00:15:31 Stuff I work on - Emacs News
Emacs News helps a lot with a number of things, actually. So I do find that in the conversations and people in the Reddit threads where people ask, oh, I'm new to Emacs, what should I read? People consistently recommend things like the Mastering Emacs blog and book... What else do people like that...? People often recommend Doom Emacs, especially if people are coming from a Vim background. And Emacs News often gets mentioned as one of the resources. I think this helps for a number of reasons, because first it gives people kind of some exposure to the cool stuff that people do with Emacs. So this is inspiration. I think it's primarily on the kind of aspirational stuff. People can see interesting demos and that motivates them to stay with Emacs. And so this is actually probably more of a kind of an Emacs news-ish thing here, from intermediate to advanced. From time to time, I do come across beginner-oriented things in my kind of survey of Emacs news-related items. So let's add that to use also EN beginner stuff. Maybe it's every couple of weeks that someone posts a link that's specifically beginner-related. And one of the things that I've been slowly doing is I've been trying to map it out so that people can find those resources.

00:17:28 Emacs Wiki
And actually I should add a thing here, Emacs Wiki. So one way I could improve is to take the links from Emacs News on a more regular basis and put them into the Emacs Wiki pages. There's like a page for newbies for example and so forth because... Not that newbies will come across those pages themselves, sometimes they do, but also because it makes it easier for other people to say, oh yeah, you want to learn more about that? Check out this page that has all these organized resources already. And one of the reasons why that's useful is because something that new people struggle with is figuring out what's close, what's close by... They know this, what's easy for them to get to? What's something they can learn with not much more effort? And this, I think, is one of the things that having a mentor helps with, or having a coach helps with. Because you can describe what it is that you're doing, or what it is that you're trying, and then they can say, oh yeah, you should check this out. I've started to try to do some of that.

00:18:53 Mapping resources
Let me bring up my map here. There you go. Beginner map. Clearly, that Org Babel needs to be connected to Org Mode. This, again, is not something that I think... Oh, there's actually another Org Babel over there. I need to deduplicate these things. But I'm trying to figure out how to represent the connections. Kind of like those choose your own adventure books, where you might only have some branching points to consider, so you're not overwhelmed by the whole graph. At the same time, you can sort of keep track of where you are. Does this thing still do the thing? Oh yeah, okay, okay. Alright, so this still does, in fact, keep track of what you clicked on. Okay, so I went through a lot of Emacs news links. I think those are the ones that were sort of beginner related. And then I started trying to organize them so that I can say, okay, all right, you've installed Emacs and Linux... I can go find Emacs installation instructions for other places. And then start to think, okay, from here, what are the kinds of things that people usually want to explore next? So, yeah, changing the colors is something that often people immediately want to do because they're used to a certain other look. And so, A tip and some resources, tips and resources, more things, back to the map, and so forth. So mapping the resources would theoretically help me or somebody else be able to say, okay, where are you in your learning journey? And what do you want to learn about next?

00:21:00 Clojure
Jeff says perhaps Clojure is a route to Emacs for experts. I've heard it's the best IDE for that language. And I should mention that too, because Clojure... Am I no longer sharing? Okay. because Clojure. Yeah, it is so far I think still one of the, like Emacs is still one of the reference IDE for it. So that is, we see a lot of people come into Emacs because They're working at a Clojure shop and they basically want to use the same IDE that everybody else is already using there. Or they're getting into Clojure, they want to do work in Clojure, and so they're learning Emacs because because that's kind of the standard IDE for now. I think the State of the Clojure survey recently said there are other editors gaining ground... More editors means more places to learn, more places to pick up ideas from, so that's not terrible. It's okay too. But that's definitely a reason why people come into Emacs. because it's the standard way of doing things. And of course, Org is wonderful, and Magit is wonderful, and people come into it just for those reasons. That is okay. And sometimes people use it only for those reasons, and that is also totally okay.

00:23:02 Emacs News and a map
Okay, so Emacs News is one of the things that I can fiddle with, and that can go into a map. And the map is more... Again, it's not quite in the state where newbies might navigate it, but if I were theoretically to have office hours, for example, then I might use that to quickly go through, like, okay, where are you? What do you want to learn? And here's some resources that other people have shared that might be helpful. And then theoretically, maybe they will keep exploring from there.

00:23:38 Cheat sheets
Oh yes, the How to Learn Emacs cheat sheet that I made ages ago. Learn Emacs. I think this is 2003. No, no, it's 2013, it feels like. I should include here. How to learn Emacs. Yeah, 2013. Okay. And the idea there was kind of a one page sheet with sort of like the most common things. What the difference is between a frame and a window, and what's the mode line, and some pointers to other things that you might want to learn. And this was... I think this was before starter kits like Doom Emacs. I don't even have Oh, this is an old URL. In fact, I should go change that. I don't even have a recommendation to learn Org first thing. Take your notes in it. Oh, no, I do have. See, it's Org Mode. Is it Org-mode? Is that even still? Yeah, okay, okay, that's still on it. Thank goodness. Okay, okay, here we go. Let's add that as a thing. So that's still being recommended, but the idea of having a single page cheat sheet, there are actually quite a few of these cheat sheets anyway. Making one yourself is always a good idea. It's a good way to deal with the overwhelm, so cheat sheet. Jumping all over the place. That's just how my brain works. It's okay. Okay, so the things that I can fiddle with. Emacs news. I have a beginner section up there. I could add an introduction to do. Add intro. So when people get to Emacs News, can I get to it? Yes. Right now, there's just this very basic subscription options, feed XML, mailing list, index.org. But I can add a little more information here for new users. to say, okay, this is how you set up elfeed. This is what Emacs News is. It's a little bit overwhelming, but you can use it for... you can keep an eye out for the beginner thing. You can look through the archives for beginner related links. And you can also start to look for recent resources related to the topics that you're interested in. So that's something I can do. There's probably an interesting way I can mark that in the audio. "Hey Sacha, do this." So that's one thing I can work on.

00:27:04 Meetups
Meetups are great for newcomers because you can get over that challenge of isolation, especially when they realize that it's totally okay to ask questions at meetups and show the things that you have that aren't working and then other people will help you think about them and figure something out. I've seen a fair bit of live debugging at places like Emacs Berlin and the Org Meetup. It's hard to ask questions sometimes on Reddit, although a lot of people do. It feels a little bit like Reddit is more effective as a help platform than Stack Exchange. But sometimes you need a bit more back and forth, and that's where the meetups can be helpful. So I guess the progression there is ask on help-gnu-emacs or, well, ask on your project-specific mailing list or help-gnu-emacs or Reddit or the Emacs subreddit. And if it feels like it needs a bit more back and forth or showing things, the meetups are helpful for that. I've also seen people asking questions in Mastodon, which is very nice. But Mastodon is a little bit more of a technical thing, I think. It's not something that a lot of newbies will be on. Anyway, the meetups. People come across meetups. Not that often. But Emacs News helps with coming across meetups because I include upcoming events in the first section here. And so what I should do is in the intro, I should also mention how to subscribe. Meetups are great. Inspiration. Okay. And that's there. We run the Emacs Big Blue Button web conferencing server year-round. We don't leave it scaled up all the time because that would be expensive, but we usually keep it as a Nanode so that I don't have to spend the week before the conference scrambling to get everything sorted out and hoping that the latest install script didn't break anything. So it's fine. We just run it year-round and then scale it up for meetups. Right now it's scaled up monthly for the Emacs Berlin, Emacs APAC, and Org Meetup meetups. But if there are other meetups that would like to have a free and open source software platform to do it, we can certainly do that. We can add them to the list there. Anyway, so that's Emacs. It goes into Emacs News.

00:30:19 Emacs Calendar
There is also an ical for it, which I could mention more prominently. Oh yeah, I actually do already mention it fairly prominently over there, so that's fine. Although I guess some people might not know that ical files can go into your calendar. So I should mention calendar in this intro for newbies that I should write, kind of like how to make the most of Emacs News. And that actually takes, is generated by this Emacs calendar thing. So that lists upcoming events. I also update the Emacs Wiki page for it with a copy of the thing, and I generate HTML calendars as well, in case that's what people prefer. Calendars. Calendars all over the place. I even generate org files in a gazillion different time zones, so that people can just include that. And I think then the time zones are all sorted out automatically. Because we... I don't think we still have time zone... We have time zone support yet in Org Mode? Anyway, it's there. Meetups. Where was I with... Yes. I need to add this to the intro. Let's highlight that in the thing that I need to do. Emacs news.

00:31:54 EmacsConf
EmacsConf is more of a, again, it's an inspiration sort of thing. We like to start the day with more beginner-oriented talks. So I'm always looking out for presentations that that makes sense to share and encourages people to kind of get into Emacs less slowly or workflows for Org Mode that can inspire them to try it out and make it a little bit more manageable. So that's in a yearly kind of schedule, students, rhythm. And so I guess the Emacs News and Emacs Conf ones are definitely more about inspiration, giving people reasons to stick with the learning curve because they can see what Emacs can do in other people's hands. And the meetups sort of help with the getting over the hump of getting a basic working environment going. Although actually people don't usually ask about basic working environments because they feel maybe a bit embarrassed. About asking about such?

00:33:15 Where people ask for help
I see more of those, like, okay, I'm trying to set up this, you know, this LSP thing, and I'm getting stuck on this thing. I see more of that on Reddit. It might also be in help-gnu-emacs, but I haven't actually been reading help-gnu-emacs, because I feel like it might be a high-traffic mailing list. I should find out, okay, what's help-gnu-emacs like these days? Because I want people to be able to... Okay. So this, I feel like, is more of... It tends to be more of a... More of an intermediate resource at the moment. Now we need a place where... Okay, so Reddit seems to be a place where people are not intimidated by the thought of posting beginner questions. And there's also Emacs Stack Exchange, but I don't think people use that as much these days. Some... Maybe... I think there's... Again, this is sort of still... Still kind of intermediate-ish questions. Maybe what I should do is...

00:35:12 Emacs Clinic?
This actually set up kind of that Emacs clinic sort of idea, which could be Thursday. Tomorrow could be a good time to experiment with it. Okay. Whenever my iPad display times out, the UX screen mirroring becomes unhappy. So let me go restart that. I need to configure a longer timeout. Let me kill that all. Kill all uxplay. All right, let's try that again. Once more with feeling.

00:36:09 My TODOs
Okay. So that's probably my big to-do out of this, is Emacs news and how to learn Emacs. Both tend to be starting points. Emacs news more than how to learn Emacs, since how to learn Emacs is a little bit dated and I need to update the URL anyway. Update URL. Where was I going with this? Anita, what was I just talking about? And the inspiration part is actually also useful for encouraging more people to try out Emacs in the first place. So that is part of the journey. Usually it's curiosity drawing people in. Sometimes it's someone saying, I'm your professor, we're going to use this. But usually it's curiosity drawing people into Emacs. So if I wanted to write a blog post about or a reflection about what I can do to help people get into Emacs more effectively, I'm still kind of focusing... I still tend to focus on the intermediate part because... Why do I? Because that's the fun part for me. When you can start to customize Emacs to fit what you want. But in order for people to get to that point, they have to be able to get Emacs to the point where they can use it for their day-to-day stuff. And then they will want to spend more time in it, and then customize it to their particular needs. So, if my evil plan is to continue enjoying the cool stuff that people come up with in Emacs, it does make sense for me to help people get their basic working environment set up.

00:38:39 Videos
@benmezger says, there are quite some interesting YouTube channels to learn Emacs too. Yes, yes. There are great video series that people have done in the past. System Crafters is often recommended, although I think David has moved on to focusing on other things lately, like AI. But his videos on Doom Emacs, though, are still often recommended as resources. Video is helpful because it shows people how it fits together and how the workflow works. Things that are hard to see from articles and blog posts. Videos are a little bit frustrating sometimes because they are slow. You actually have to watch them. But I like the way that people have been posting Videos with detailed show notes in a literate programming style, with embedded snippets, and often they will even use this blog post as the starting point of or the final product of their video. I would like to be able to do more of these myself, but it may require that I learn how to organize my thoughts, which is part of this whole brainstorm things, and then ideally turn it into a blog post or series of blog posts. The videos are great because they help people show workflows, which is good for inspiring people to put in the effort to then go through the show notes and try the steps, but also kind of see other things that the person making the video might not have even mentioned. Often people will make a video, and a lot of the comments are like, what is that theme that they are using? Or they do this thing which changes the window configuration, and what is that? Delete other windows vertically. And the presenter might not even have thought of mentioning that. but because we are virtually looking over someone's shoulder, you get to see that. Ben continues, videos, indeed videos help show how powerful Emacs can be. Simply installing Emacs doesn't give you that viewpoint.

00:41:12 Learning curve
So that's it. I think, especially since our learning curve is, remember that meme that got passed around before really memes were codified, invented? Where the learning curve of Emacs is kind of like this. This is the learning curve of Emacs. It's just very fractal. We need that inspiration to help us get through the afternoons of, ah, why doesn't this thing just break out of the box? Why do I need to write Emacs Lisp to configure this? It's definitely a very different expectation from many other editors, where you're just expected to either have it, or check a checkbox, and then it's there. But because Emacs, there's so many different ways to use Emacs, it's really hard to say, okay, this stuff is going to be hard-coded for everyone, or this stuff is going to be the easy way. Anyway, and people come into Emacs with all sorts of different expectations too, right? So it really helps to see other people use Emacs in a way that suits them And to know that it is possible to have something that suits you as well. So making more videos. I would like to get the hang of doing that also. But I like blog posts and I like transcripts. So I want to be able to improve my workflow for making these videos and live streams so that They also make sense to people who don't have the time to watch a video stream for one hour or whatever. And it would be great for the video to make sense even if you're not looking at the video directly, you know, to make the audio make sense in case you're listening to it like a podcast while you're washing the dishes or going for a walk. So blog posts and podcasts.

00:43:21 emacs.tv - TODO: Add more to the beginner tag, make a playlist
Which reminds me that Emacs TV is a thing, although that's not super beginner-friendly in the sense that I can't just say, here's all the beginner-related topics. I should go back over the 3,000 plus videos over that and maybe index the beginner ones. Let's see what we got here anyway. Emacs TV. How many do we have now? Yeah, 3000 something. Do I have beginner? I do have beginner as a tag. 26 things flagged as beginners. Some of them are in different languages, but that seems like the sort of thing. That could be fun as a YouTube playlist, because people like to just play through a playlist. And then I can try to sort them, I guess? Maybe. Beginner playlist. Beginner playlist. That's another to-do. Okay. Interesting. This is great. I'm identifying a number of to-dos for myself. All right. Lifelong learning, which is how I want to take this idea of newbies and starter kits and apply it to everybody because many of the same problems that we run into, many same problems that newbies run into with regard to isolation and overwhelm and the balance between tinkering with your config and getting stuff done. Let's write that down somewhere. and Isolation. Unknowns. Okay, so four common problems that newbies run into. Isolation, overwhelm, balancing, tinkering with your setup and getting stuff done, and kind of getting the set like Dealing with unknowns. Let me turn down the filter. It's a little too strong. Now can I make hand gestures? Not really. Okay, I will tinker with that eventually. okay um the same kinds of problems that we run into even if we've been using Emacs for decades uh and this uh uh emerald that i'll uh establish in the video it's a lifelong journey uh okay so

00:46:36 Isolation
Isolation. Meetups help. But meetups are harder for people to get to. You might not find something that's the right schedule for you. I highly, highly recommend writing about your Emacs learning. Blogging is a great way to connect with other people who are interested in the same kinds of things. And we've got Planet Emacs Life. Ooh, I should write that down as a thing. Planet Emacs Life. And we've got Emacs News to help kind of keep the conversation circulating. So that's there. @Mtendethecreator says, what's up? What's up, @Mtendethecreator? Currently I am brain dumping various things for various ideas for the Emacs Carnival April. Okay, so isolation, overwhelm, balance of time, unknowns. So here I want to think about, okay, even for people who might not consider themselves as total newbies anymore, It's always good to keep a beginner's mind in Emacs because there's so much to learn. Just the other day, I was reading a discussion thread where one of the commenters was singing the praises of Org Remark, so now I have a new thing that I want to go figure out how to add to my workflow. There's always something interesting to tinker with and learn. Anyway, so everybody can benefit from the things that we can do in this area. Isolation, I'd strongly recommend blogging, Meetups This is where the aggregator goes in.

00:48:54 Overwhelm
Overwhelm, figuring out how to take notes and how to bring up your notes... Customize interface So that's how people start to deal with that. Balance of time... I don't know. I think this is a much... This is an ongoing problem. And... Well, ongoing challenge. Because the... You know, tinkering with Emacs becomes more fun as you get used to it.

00:49:35 IRC
Oh, IRC. Yes, IRC. I should mention... We should definitely mention that. IRC. Helps with isolation and getting help. Although people also... like some... are they still having issues with spammers and needing to restrict the channel? I've been meaning to write a page that explains what to do in that situation. I should drop in to see what's going on there. Reddit, I think, is where people... Okay, I need to... Okay, let's label these things. A, B, C, and D. And this balance of time is actually related to getting a basic working environment started out. So if the reddit is good at A and C and also D actually. Isolation and balance of time. A little bit. People have to learn how to use pastebin and it's a little bit harder on IRC to say, oh yeah, this is the... People do pastebin the problem and then people sometimes do pastebin the solutions. Sometimes a lot of things can be handled by a quick question, so that's good. Okay, I said isolation. Balance of time is always still a problem, but people develop their own productivity prioritization type things. Structures? Frameworks? And for lifelong learning, this unknowns part becomes really interesting and powerful. Yeah, and this is where bumping into ideas helps. Through IRC, through Reddit, through all the Emacs News, etc.

00:52:19 Learning from other people's configs; TODO maybe a livestream?
Charlie says, searching through GitHub for Emacs keywords to see how other people configure things helped my Emacs customization understanding. If Emacs customization is one of the things that helps people move from being a total newbie to an intermediate user, then maybe it makes sense to have and in addition to the clinics that I mentioned, some kind of a live stream where we just go read other people's configs and then talk about how to adapt it and show a demonstration of a way that fits into the workflow. I think that could be a lot of fun. I've been enjoying going through Prot and tecosaur's literate configurations, and slowly assimilating some of those snippets into my configuration. So it might be interesting for people to see more of that process of not just copying and pasting the code, but trying to figure out, okay, what can support me as I try to make this part of the way that I do things? Or how do I tweak it so that it's a blend of what they came up with and also what I want. So yeah, @mtendethecreator says, tsoding's config also. Yeah, whoever's config is posted, we can go through it. And then I can say, oh yeah, that's really cool. Like for example, reading Prot's config. I learned about delete-other-windows-vertically, which I think he had assigned to C-x !, like C-x !, I think, yeah, which is cool because it's like C-x 1 except it's shifted. So that teaches me about the function and also a convenient shortcut that makes sense it's easy to remember so reading through other people's config could be a thing that might be helpful for you to do and because again because video is annoying to go through if i can have my workflow for Adding chapter markers into it. Then I can jump into... Then people can jump to just a section. Charlie says, that sounds nice. I cherry picked a lot of Purcell's config as I hit modes I wanted to use, and then later I adapted it to use-package. And now it's mine. Yes. Yes, that's the... That's wonderful. That's the basic idea. That's one of the reasons why I love it when people share their configs. Okay, so that gives me plenty of things to do. And if I want to think then about this blog post... Let's write in a different color. I can use colors! Let's write in... Can I write in green? Okay. Okay. That's too... Okay. Blue looks... Blue looks linky. Let's write in... Okay. Maroon? Alright. What does this feel like? I have seven minutes before I should probably go check on the kid for maybe doing math together with her. She gets really bored in her math class, so I tried to do... I offered to do some math with her that's a little bit higher level. uh

00:56:07 Discord?
@mtendethecreator says please create a discord for your channel. IRC is cool but the new wave of devs prefer discord. Think about it. I know system crafters runs a discord for their community. Are there other discord places that emacs people hang out in? Yeah, there's like... I have to look into whether it's possible. @DavidMannMD says, I can highly recommend Prot's book on Emacs Lisp. Yes.

00:57:10 Thinking about the blog posts
So this sounds like maybe there's a blog post here about the factors that people... Like, trying to give some basic recommendations on where people... If this is your background, this is why we make this recommendation. These are the recommendations people often make. And this is why. And here's some basic resources. So this sounds like possibly a blog post. Post about where people come from. And typical resources. Next steps. And there is probably a blog post here about the challenges. which I can address from both a new user perspective as well as the, hey, this continues to be a challenge. And then there's one here about following up on my to-dos. And let's highlight these, make it easier. Someday I will actually pick colors that go together.

00:58:55 Books
Ben says, would including books be a good option for lifelong learning? There's some interesting books I've seen throughout my journey. Yes, yes. I love how the books, there aren't a lot of books because Emacs keeps moving, but it takes a lot of effort to make a book. But the people who have written books, like Prot, like Mickey, do an amazing job of organizing things into a linear structure that makes sense. Books are great for this, especially for dealing with the sense of overwhelm and unknowns. Let's take a few a little bit at a time.

00:59:46 Manuals
The manuals are great too. Just even going through the Org Manual once in a while helps me stumble across things that are helpful. So getting people to feel like they're ready to read a book earlier rather than later, or feel like they're ready to read the manual. and maybe modeling how to do it, like showing them, okay, you can be reading this. The manual doesn't have a lot of examples, but this is how you can dig around for examples to see how it works. Could be helpful.

01:00:25 Maybe annotating the manual?
I feel like if we have like an annotated Org Mode manual, here's the manual, but here are also some links to videos where people are demonstrating this concept, it could be interesting. One of my to-do's for a while has been do that do that kind of beginner map, but for Org, because people have shared a ton of Org resources in Emacs News. Where was I? Books. Yes, that is. Okay, so there are three things... probably more.

01:01:04 Starter kits
Oh, starter kits! That's a whole other thing. Starter Kits. I think that if people are coming from a, let's say they're coming from a programming background, and there's pressure on them to be productive as soon as possible, then Starter Kits are a great idea, possibly. If they find a Starter Kit that fits the way they think, and gets the stuff they need working as soon as possible, fantastic. Hats off to them. Go for it. And then they can ease into more Emacsy things later on. The challenge, of course, with starter kits is because they change Emacs a lot, it makes it harder for newbies to get help outside that community. So they should pick a starter kit with a community they can ask for help within. Other people will be just like, I don't know what kinds of things are going on there. And of course, the newbie has no idea how to disable things or turn things off or go back to vanilla for some things. And so it's, it's, it's just complicated. Can't really expect people helping to go install this separate starter kit and figure that things out. The starter kits are useful in that situation, but in other cases, like for example, if you're getting into Emacs slowly and you're curious, it can help to start from vanilla so you know what things you're adding to it.

01:02:32 Navigating source code
@lispwizard says M-x apropos, looking at Emacs source files for related stuff are also helpful. And learning how to navigate source code to find examples and read it is also a skill that nobody is born with. Figuring out how to help people develop that skill is interesting. But I will go check on the kiddo now.

01:02:51 Braindumping with company
This has been very helpful for me. Kind of brain dumping random ideas onto... It's not even really a mind map. It's just bleargh onto this sketch. But doing it with people hanging out and helping me remember stuff or think of stuff is helpful and well worth my voice getting extra tired. So thank you for coming and hanging out with me today. And I will go work on turning these things into blog posts and possibly videos and live streams going forward. I will skedaddle now. Today I need to sew a hat for my kiddo, but tomorrow, I will probably hang out with you maybe slightly roughly at the same time. Thanks, everyone, and see you!

Chat

  • @j7gy8b: ​​do people still try the built-in tutorial?
  • @j7gy8b: I'm Jeff from Emacs SF and I don't know how to change my display name
  • @lispwizard: ​​One problem is platforms which usurp keystrokes which emacs expects (I just wrestled with this on a raspberry pi).
  • @j7gy8b: ​in the meetup we do see that, the young people who were inspired by a professor to try
  • @j7gy8b: ​Perhaps Clojure is a route to Emacs for experts. I've heard it's the best IDE for that language
  • @benmezger: ​​There are quite some interesting youtube channels (yours included) to learn Emacs too
  • @lispwizard: ​You can often watch videos at 2x speed…
  • @benmezger: ​indeed. Videos help show how powerful emacs can be. Simply installing Emacs doesnt give you that viewpoint
  • @mtendethecreator: ​​wazzup
  • @mtendethecreator: ​​someone says pi-coding-agent is the emacs for ai agents. thoughts?
  • @benmezger: ​IRC perhaps? although a little complex, you learn tons from the Emacs channel
  • @charliemcmackin4859: ​​Searching through Github for emacs keywords to see how other people configure things helped my Emacs customization understanding.
  • @mtendethecreator: ​tsodings config lol
  • @charliemcmackin4859: ​​That sounds nice… I cherry picked a lot of purcell's config as I hit modes I wanted to use… and then later I adapted it to use-package…and now it's mine :D
  • @mtendethecreator: ​please create a discord for your channel. irc is cool but the new wave of devs prefer discord. think about it
  • @DavidMannMD: ​​I can highly recommend Prot's book on Emacs lisp.
  • @charliemcmackin4859: ​​(as an idea for looking at other's configs as a method of learning… "how would I adapt this to use use-package?" is something I find myself thinking a bit)
  • @benmezger: ​Would including books be a good option for lifelong learning? There are some interesting books I've seen throughout my journey
  • @lispwizard: ​​m-x apropos, looking at emacs source files for related stuff are also helpful
  • @lispwizard: ​​Thank you.
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You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
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May 7: Emacs Chat with Shae Erisson

| emacs, emacs-chat-podcast, emacs-chat

On May 7, I'll chat with Shae Erisson about Emacs and life.

Watch on YouTube

(America/Toronto UTC-4) = Thu May 7 1030H EDT / 0930H CDT / 0830H MDT / 0730H PDT / 1430H UTC / 1630H CEST / 1730H EEST / 2000H IST / 2230H +08 / 2330H JST

This session will be recorded, and I'll update this blog post with notes. https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-7-emacs-chat-with-shae-erisson/

Find more Emacs Chats or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat

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You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
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