On 2020-10-22 11:07, Chary Chary wrote: Question: can somebody advice learning path for absolute Emacs beginner to be able to use productively Emacs beancount mode?
The built-in tutorial is actually very good (C-h t). In the first few pages, it covers most of the things people new to Emacs usually find "weird" (mainly, basic navigation, concept of buffers, etc.). But Emacs is an extremely powerful tool. And, like any such tool, requires an investment in learning it. You can get up to speed on the basics (navigation, where to find more help (C-h ?)) fairly quickly, but to really get the most out of it will require a longer term investment of time and concentration. Whether that is an investment you are willing or desire to make, only you can know. I can tell you, that even though my desire was great, it still took me a few attempts, over a period of a couple years, to really get off the ground finally (but maybe you are smarter than me?). :D The payoff, is that Emacs is literally the editor of a lifetime. Although it's more like an entire computing environment, than an editor, really. Think of it as your own personal Lisp machine, because that is essentially what it is. All the memes are true. Because once you become familiar in that environment, you start to want to do more and more in it. There are real advantages to a consistent environment and keybindings, in a way that can be hard to appreciate at first when coming from the usual inconsistent, widely varying (and ever changing) tools. Do you need/want all of that that? Only you can answer that for yourself. If you just want to do the most basic Beancount stuff, you can use arrow keys and tab. And view the mode-specific help (C-h m) which will give you an overview of the rest of the keybindings. Doing the first bit of the tutorial will also pay large dividends, quickly. Beyond that, it's up to you. If you fall in love, eventually later on you will probably want to do the (also built in) Emacs Lisp tutorial, which will be the next big leap forward in your grokking of Emacs. But let's not get ahead of ourselves... Good luck! TRS-80 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/bee19a723d61efbfc990f377a67a44d7%40isnotmyreal.name.
