System Crafters

GNU Emacs

Refer to the video series and show notes on Emacs for more thorough "tutorial" style content that David has put together. Here are some quick jumping off points:

Emacs Essentials

This is a series for true beginners and explains the fundamentals of Emacs.

Emacs from scratch

This is a series geared towards crafting your custom Emacs configuration. Out of the box configurations like doom, spacemacs, and prelude are also good options to see how these "opinionated" setup the emacs environment so you can hack on your own setup more.

Emacs's help system

Emacs is a self documented editor, meaning with couple of key presses, you can find user guides, description of commands, functions, variables and more. Head over the help cheatsheet to learn more about this awesome documentation system.

More Emacs Content

There's a lot more content on the Videos page.

Emacs and org-mode

org-mode is an outline markup format that helps you take notes, manage and schedule your TODOs, and a lot more.

Here are some useful related packages:

  • org-roam: A plain-text personal knowledge management system
  • deft: Deft is an Emacs mode for quickly browsing, filtering, and editing directories of plain text notes, inspired by Notational Velocity
  • org-super-agenda: This package lets you “supercharge” your Org daily/weekly agenda. The idea is to group items into sections, rather than having them all in one big list

Transitioning to Emacs

There is a good possibility that there is an overlap between the Emacs-curious and keyboard shortcut users. However, the Emacs keybidings are quite different than the Common User Access (CUA) that a lot of users are familiar with. Here's a quick snippet of configuration that provides a more familiar way to start exploring Emacs: 

;; CUA type customizations and conveniences=====================================
;; Simpleclip to access system clipboard
(require 'simpleclip)
(setq simpleclip-mode 1)

(map! :gin "C-S-x" #'simpleclip-cut ;Was: C-x chord
      :gin "C-S-c" #'simpleclip-copy ;Was: C-x chord
      :gin "C-S-v" #'clipboard-yank ;freezing on Ubuntu: 'simpleclip-paste ;Was: C-x chord
      :gin "C-z" #'undo ; Was: enable Emacs state
      :gin "C-S-z" #'redo ;Was: C-x chor
      :gin "C-<tab>" #'switch-to-next-buffer ;Was: aya-create snippet
      :gin "C-S-<tab>" #'switch-to-prev-buffer ;Was: C-x chord
      :gin "C-w" #'kill-buffer ;Was: evil-window-map
      :gin "C-a" #'mark-whole-buffer ;Was: doom/backward-to-bol-or-indent
      )

;; Save. Was: isearch-forward
(map! "C-s" #'save-buffer)
;; Save as. Was: nil
(map! "C-S-s" #'write-file)

;; Ctrl shift P like Sublime Text Editor for command launching
(map! "C-S-p" #'execute-extended-command)

Note: Emacs has a default option called CUA mode (available through the menu) or (setq cua-mode 1) but the configuration above provides a little more expected functionality by using a simple clipboard and redo/undo model.